Launchkit has just announced that it’s joining on at Google to help the search company build developer tools. Launchkit, a company who has built and released mobile apps to the Play Store themselves, started releasing their internal tools to the public and open sourcing them as a way to assist other developers build mobile apps as well as launch and manage them. As part of Google’s Developer Product Group moving forward, the Launchkit team will continue to do what they have been doing but under the Google umbrella and at a larger scale than before. For developers who currently use Launchkit’s product suite, the services will stay intact and usable for the next year, but Launchkit does mention that after that time the services will be discontinued.
While the official Launchkit services won’t be around forever, the good news for developers who have enjoyed using their services to build and launch their own mobile apps is that Launchkit has also now made their services open source, and have posted all relating information to them on github for anyone to access. With these services now being open source Launchkit states that anyone who is interested will have the capability to create their own instance of the Launchkit tools.
To date Launchkit is being used by nearly 50,000 developers to build and monitor mobile apps for both the Android and the iOS platforms, and although it won’t be in an official capacity after the service is taken offline in 12 months, the open sourced services on github will provide a way for developers to still have access to Launchkit in a roundabout way. At the github post, developers who want to take advantage of these tools and services will see a step by step guide to getting things going. Google nor Launchkit have mentioned any details about the acquisition terms, but with Launchkit joining the Google Developer Product Group, they’ll be joining along with other services and products such as Firebase, Maps, Android, Analytics, Cast, Cloud Platform, and many more. It wasn’t stated specifically which areas in the Developer Product Group that Launchkit would be working on.