Vancouver-based development studio Buddybuild shared on their blog that they have been acquired by Apple. Buddybuild offers a service for users to build, test and ship iOS apps to testers, similar to TestFlight, which Apple also acquired in 2014 through its purchase of Burstly.
Buddybuild will eventually integrate into Xcode, Apple’s suite of development tools for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
We're excited to share that the buddybuild team has joined the Xcode engineering group at Apple to build amazing developer tools for the entire iOS community.
We've always been proud to be a Canadian company, so we're also pleased that we will be staying right here in Vancouver — a hotbed of developer and engineering talent. - buddybuild announced on their website.
The buddybuild service will remain available to existing customers to build, test, and ship iOS apps to testers through buddybuild.com.
As of today, buddybuild is no longer accepting new customers. Existing Free Starter plans and Android app development will be discontinued on March 1, 2018.