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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy for the founders, this is probably a good and profitable exit for them. But as a customer I am really sad and disappointed.

Apple has a very bad reputation when it comes to taking over products like this. TestFlight is the prime example. TestFlight basically disappeared for a year until coming back as a more limited and slower Apple branded service. And by slow I mostly mean, it takes 6 months for bugs to be fixed or for exciting things to happen. Agility and innovation of a startup basically ends when Apple assimilates a service.

From the blog posting it is also not very clear what will happen to existing iOS customers. Can I upgrade my plan? Can I expect service? Will the existing infrastructure be maintained?

I'm excited about what this could mean in terms of Xcode and Xcode Server improvements. Or maybe even a hosted CI service at Apple. But that it all long term 'maybe'.

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Apple is notoriously bureaucratic. So its not surprising that innovation is stifled. I really hate this duality b/w innovation and stability... perhaps if more startups were focused on longer term survivability, it would be better for society overall?

I wonder if Apple's satellite operations (like the Siri team in Ottawa, Canada, for example) might have some autonomy and self direction simply due to distance from the mothership.

As for a shift in startup culture, what is more tempting than 5 to 10 years of hard work into billion dollar exits? Local governments could start offering tax incentives that build over time—or more aggressively, have steep disincentives on corporate takeovers.

Siri team in Ottawa? I find that hard to believe. Why would such an important team not be on the main campus?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16052821

That says they have "begun expanding" there, GGP makes it sounds like "the Siri team" is mostly a "satellite operation".

That explains why Siri doesn't understand beanie but knows the word "toque"

Steep incentives for corporate takeovers is a bad idea IMO - that lack of option in a liquidity event would make less companies receive funding. It would be even more risky to our venture capital behind a new idea.

Innovation and stability are tautologically in opposition to each other, alas.

I've found that this doesn't have to be the case.

Continuous deployment is a good example where this doesn't hold. You roll out things more quickly... and you experience less issues!

When issues happen, the cause is easier to isolate. After all, you only had one day's worth of changes (and not one year's worth). The previous state is more knowable. Testing is more concentrated.

Apple's new OS releases are the opposite of this. They release 30 different major changes at once, they all collide, and we end up just assuming that .0 releases will be broken.

In an alternate universe, Apple just releases updates to parts of software when it's ready. They don't pin Safari to the OS (because there's not much of a technical reason to). They could pinpoint _when_ "Month 13" started showing up everywhere beyond "when everyone downloaded that 7 gig update".

It takes some effort and tooling, but if you're expecting to make changes, a lot of times making the changes piecemeal will mean that post-release stability will increase in many cases.

There are innovations that happen all the time specifically around making things smoother and more stable.

Look at air transportation. It was a series of fairly novel and innovative programs that took place to make a new transportation industry the safest by a mile. It was some serious hard work and innovation to make air transportation the safest and most stable way to travel.

No, they are perpendicular. An optimal path can be found so that both advance in the desired direction.

It might be, but Apple, Google, FB, MSFT, etc, still have the ability to roll one of those giant mining dump trucks full of money up to the founder's doors, so you're always going to have the possibility that they just get bought out.

Seems like an acqui-hire to me.

Yeah, maybe they are opening up a shop in Vancouver.

Apple already has a shop in Vancouver

Seems like a huge waste of money to put software engineers in an Apple store.

Given that Apple Stores average about $5000/sq ft in revenue, it would be big waste to have that space taken up by software engineers.

You can purchases strata title triple A class office space in Vancouver for less than that.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/unprecedented...

Vancouver BC or Washington? Cause they have a team in Vancouver Washington working on things like Pages.

If you mean an office, there is already an engineering office here in Vancouver, BC. (As others have posted, there is also a few retail stores)

Sometimes I wonder - isn't that an opportunity in disguise for another shop to fill the gaps? Or I am missing something?

There have been other shops that fill those games. Buddybuild was one of them.

Testflight is completely useless now.

Testflight is extremely useful if you want to test your production build before releasing it to the public. Before Apple bought it there was no way to test the exact same build before releasing it on the App Store.

There are no-bullshit alternatives out there now.

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