Google has acquired San Francisco-based app builder, LaunchKit that offers a suite of tools to enable mobile application developers create, launch and monitor their applications. LaunchKit made the acquisition public in a blog post but financial and legal details of the deal have not been disclosed yet.
The acquisition will direct the team behind LaunchKit into Google’s Developer Group and will potentially promote integration of Google’s tools and products including Google Cloud Platform and Firebase that provides automatic data synchronization, authentication services, messaging, file storage and analytics.
After open sourcing its internal tools to track sales, reviews and build landing pages for applications and services, LaunchKit has pledged to continue to expand the number of tools it makes available to developers to build Android apps at Google. The company also said that its standalone services will be around for another year before it shuts down completely.
LaunchKit that offers services like Screenshot Builder, App Website Builder, Review Monitor and Sales Reporter, came into being in the year 2015 and was co-founded by Brenden Mulligan, Taylor Hughes, and Riz Sattar who had also joined hands to build photo sharing mobile app, Cluster.
The team also mentioned that developers can access all its services and mobile app related information on GitHub to develop their own. A step-to-step guide can also be found to help coders avail the most of it. Brenden Mulligan, Co-Founder and CEO, LaunchKit, in a company blog post said:
“As we focus our efforts on building great developer tools at Google, we also want to make everything we’ve built at LaunchKit even more accessible. As of today, we’ve open sourced our services so anyone can set up their own instance of our tools!”
“As for the official LaunchKit service, it will continue to operate independently for existing users for the next 12 months, then it will be discontinued,” he added.
According to claims, launchKit has helped almost 50,000 developers build, launch, and monitor their apps for both Android and the iOS platforms. The company website also says that Screenshot Builder tool has managed to create over 1,000,000 Screenshots which have been used to build over 8,000 websites. Other companies that provide similar services and tools in today’s app market are iBuildApp, MyAppBuilder and Appy Pie.
The post also mentions and thanks investors including Baseline, Freestyle, First Round, Brian SV Angel, Google Ventures, Sherpa and other angel investors that helped LaunchKit raise funds (also undisclosed), prior to the acquisition.