8 ms·

HockeyApp Joins Microsoft

160 points by davidbarker 12y ago

kolencherry 12y ago
This is really interesting. Microsoft has HockeyApp and Apple has TestFlight. I wonder if this is a push on their part to enhance the testing tooling available for Windows Phone.
- binarymax 12y ago
  Microsoft's strategy is shifting away from Windows Phone only, and is working hard on getting their non-windows software stack on all devices. While it will probably help windows phone tooling, Microsoft is painfully aware of the small market share WP has compared to iOS and Android.
bugsense 12y ago
Wow, this was unexpected, congrats to HockeyApp team! What they have built is impressive. No VC funding, no bs, just awesome work and great community.
andyjohnson0 12y ago
I just signed-up with HockeyApp this morning and have been very impressed with the experience. Congratulations to the team! Previously we'd been using TestFlight for iOS and the PLsy Store's built-in beta-test functionality for Android, but it is convenient to have one service that supports a range of mobile OSs and a lower-friction deployment process. When TestFlight was bought by Apple, they fairly quickly abandoned support for non-iOS pltforms. I'm confident that Microsoft isn't short-sighted enough to do something similar.
- NicoJuicy 12y ago
  Microsoft realizes it has to be cross platform... Most important change since the new CEO arrived :)
  - scholia 12y ago
    Except that change was already well under way long before the new CEO arrived ;-)
    - NicoJuicy 12y ago
      They didn't went all in ( Office = milk cow), they did a huge shift now with Satya Nadella. That is a fundemental change vs. a change from the inside ( before it was pushed because some people grasped the concept and they were allowed to try it out)
      - nailer 12y ago
        Yeah it was shortly after Satya taking over that MS Office for iPad was released. They'd obviously had the code there, but the authority to actually get it out seemed to be lacking.
        blumkvist 12y ago
        No, they just needed the new face to kick things off, so everybody can attribute the change and believe. EEE. Watch and learn. This is why Microsoft will never die, no matter how hard some people's wishful thinking.
        scholia 12y ago
        Sad but true. Ballmer could have done the same things but wouldn't have got the same response. It generally takes Microsoft years to do things. Anyone who doesn't realize all this stuff was already a long way down the pipeline needs hitting with a cluestick ;-)
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Except that change was already well under way long before the new CEO arrived Nadella didn't emerge out of nowhere, he was already an executive at Microsoft and was driving many of the kinds of changes that have accelerated since he became CEO even before becoming CEO.
- chillax 12y ago
  From: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/12/08/microsoft-acquires-hockeyapp-leading-mobile-crash-analytics-and-beta-distribution-service-for-ios-android-and-windows-phone.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/12/08/microso... "We will integrate HockeyApp into the Application Insights service in Visual Studio Online to expand Application Insights support for iOS and Android." Seems to me they're positioning themselves for more cross platform development.
wclax04 12y ago
Congrats guys. We use HockeyApp and love it!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
woogle 12y ago
I'm not sure it is a good news. In one hand it's great to hear that Analytics will be added and cross support is still important. But in the other hand, it puts developers in inconfortable position. Should we still use HockeyApp for our iOS apps? Depend on a tool owned by a concurrent of your target platform is not so safe on a long term sight..
- untog 12y ago
  I'm not too worried about it. After all, MS has released Office on iOS, and partnered with Xamarin for iOS development. They'd be insane to buy HockeyApp then kill everything it has and replace it with a Windows Phone only solution. It's weird, but MS is almost one of the best large companies to do cross-platform dev with these days.
  - woogle 12y ago
    I agree with that, but things may be different in 2 years. And MS is also the company that gains the most money with each Android phone sold.
    - scholia 12y ago
      Microsoft has also been providing software for Macs since 1984, when it appeared at the launch, and it generally makes more money per head from Mac users (who buy lots of copies of Windows and Office) than Windows users (roughly $45 each per 4-5 years). The only reason it would quit on iOS is if it couldn't make any money from iOS users. And the only reason it wouldn't be able to make money from iOS users would be if Apple went down in flames.
      - potatolicious 12y ago
        > "Microsoft has also been providing software for Macs since 1984, when it appeared at the launch, and it generally makes more money per head from Mac users (who buy lots of copies of Windows and Office) than Windows users (roughly $45 each per 4-5 years)." All true, but that hasn't prevented the quality of MS software on Macs from varying between first class and complete bottom of the barrel. Right now iOS/OSX seems to be enjoying high priority at Microsoft, but this hasn't always been the case, even when Macs were popular. Normally I'd say that this is all fairly inconsequential, but HockeyApp is a very core part of our development process and build system, and disentangling ourselves of it is going to be a lot more complicated than, say, swapping analytics providers. Definitely not something you can do on a dime, which makes any potential sudden moves pretty concerning. And post-acquisition startups (regardless of who acquired them) tend to be full of sudden moves...
tehcodez 12y ago
Remember when Apple bought test flight? That sure worked out well for people building apps for multiple platforms. I'm sufficiently concerned.
- smackfu 12y ago
  I really doubt Microsoft is going to make it Windows Phone only. Windows Phone is just not that valuable as a platform.
  - scholia 12y ago
    Windows Phone and tablet software is free as in beer ;-)
- scholia 12y ago
  Apple uses software to sell hardware, and usually stops supporting other platforms when it buys things. That's how its closed, proprietary world works. Microsoft makes its money from software not hardware, and most of it comes via third parties not direct sales. It licenses most of its software across multiple brands of hardware, and it's been supporting non-Windows platforms (in the form of Mac OS and iOS) for a long time. It's already hosting Linux on Azure. It's not going to close off markets for doctrinaire reasons, only if there's no money in them...
CmonDev 12y ago
I was afraid it's another of those HTML5 hybrid providers, but it's actually something useful.
gtop 12y ago
Awesome, hope they keep supporting iOS and Android distribution.
- pistle 12y ago
  It fits nicely within the dev story around getting .net and C# running across platforms along with the Xamarin partnership. With testflight evaporating, this is a logical acquisition. Does it make sense to keep it open to native devs? Sure. They can have ramps placed in front of them for using Azure and various telemetry solutions.
dharma1 12y ago
Also used to use Testflight when they still did Android, and signed up with Hockey App yesterday. Hope the Microsoft acquisition doesn't mean that I'll have to find another beta testing platform again!
OneDrive 12y ago
This looks cool. Is there anything similar provide free personal account?
coldcode 12y ago
Been using Beta by Crashlytics since Apple screwed up TestFlight. If MS does continue to support iOS maybe I will switch to that.
- faizmokhtar 12y ago
  How is your experience so far? Is it much easier? Been using Crashlytics mainly for the crash reports, never tried anything else.
  - coldcode 12y ago
    I use it for Enterprise apps mostly to send to myself. Internally we have a website where people can get our apps but for testing on multiple devices it's OK. Haven't tried it on a lot of users though. TestFlight was awesome but now it's mostly horrible once Apple made it so painful.
danabramov 12y ago
HockeyApp is awesome. They're very supportive, and the tooling itself is very good. Happy for them!
brianobush 12y ago
Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with hockey...
- Avalaxy 12y ago
  Not even with ice hockey!
- guiomie 12y ago
  Ahaha. Yah I was surprised to see no relation. Or perhaps there is one that we don't know ? I thought maybe they were a Canadian company, but they don't seem to be...
- skyebook 12y ago
  I believe I've read in the past that its a play on "Ad-Hoc". Yes, also disappointed its not about hockey.
- jeremy_wiebe 12y ago
  If they aren't hockey related, at least they could have gone all out with hockey branding and terminology!
vm 12y ago
Microsoft is back for acquisitions! This is good for everyone working on tech startups. Recent buys: Acompli - Dec 1, $200M / Aorato - Nov 13, $200M / Equivio - Oct 8, $200M / Mojang (Minecraft) - Sept 15, $2.5B Microsft even started accepting Bitcoin today and recently did a major BD deal with Dropbox. Zombie no more.
neves 12y ago
Hey, the business reason to buy it is clear. Nobody develops for Windows Phone, but everybody has the burden to develop for two plataforms: iOS and Android. If MS lower the burden and automatically makes it very, very easy to develop for Windows Phone, they will finally have some decent software in their plataform.
- hluska 12y ago
  That's a good, concise explanation of a potential strategy. Excellent job!
- bugsense 12y ago
  MS will buy Xamarin next. VS is free now, you will deploy your app to tester with Hockey, test it, monitor it and then offer you Azure Mobile Services
  - Immortalin 12y ago
    MS won't buy Xamarin unless someone else is planning to buy it. They probably have some sort of exclusive agreement to give MS priority when buying. It is simply cheaper for MS to let Xamarin run itself than to take it under the wing of MS.
    - scholia 12y ago
      True. Also, Xamarin/Mono already gets all kinds of crap from Linux purists and being owned by Microsoft would probably made that worse....
- realharo 12y ago
  I've always wondered, if MS want more apps to support their platform, how come they're the only mobile OS (including the obscure ones) that doesn't support OpenGL ES? Way to shoot themselves in the foot...
neves 12y ago
Hey, the business reason to buy it is clear. Nobody develops for Windows Phone, but everybody has the burden to develop for two plataforms: iOS and Android. If MS lower the burden and automatically makes it very, very easy to develop for Windows Phone, they will finally have some decent software in their plataform.
hdivider 12y ago
Great news. What I love about HockeyApp (vs TestFlight) is that I don't really have to bother with the App Store Review Guidelines. Makes testing much faster. Plus, they show they care when it comes to integration: tons of help, plus a special wizard to make it easy.
thijser 12y ago
It's interesting to see the consolidation in this space. HockeyApp is the #2 most used crash reporting library for Android according to our stats: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/crash-reporting/android-crash-reporting-libraries http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/crash-reporting/... The #1, crashlytics, was acquired in early 2013 by Twitter, and BugSense was acquired by Splunk.
robertwalsh0 12y ago
"What browsers work with HockeyApp? We have developed and tested with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari." Kinda funny.
maresca 12y ago
I had used HockeyApp for 3 months while testing my current set of mobile apps. I had used it to test an iPhone app and it was terribly painful. Those pains were mostly from Apple's end though. Once I had found out Apple bought TestFlight, I canceled my HockeyApp subscription. Does anyone have any input on the comparison of HockeyApp and Play Store beta testing for the testing process of android apps?
sreejithr 12y ago
"When we founded our company, our intent and mission was to always stay indie." You sold out, dude.
- tdicola 12y ago
  Everyone has a price. Everyone.
  - busterarm 12y ago
    Especially me. I'm even cheap!
- Lightbody 12y ago
  You say it like it's some mark of shame. They built a product, found success, a bigger company wanted it, and then found more success via acquisition. What's wrong with that?
  - _random_ 12y ago
    He identified a strong discrepancy between their vision and their decision. What's wrong with that?
filmgirlcw 12y ago
Congrats to Michael and team on this! After Apple bought TestFlight and relaunched their testing offering this year at WWDC, it was clear Hockey would have a problem competing in the Apple device space (even though I think their product is superior to what TestFlight was -- haven't used the new TestFlight enough to compare). The tools are great for users and developers and I think this will be great for Microsoft. Glad to see it end up in good hands. Truly a great service.
kyberias 12y ago
It wasn't easy to find out what HockeyApp actually does. Here's some information buried in their site: http://support.hockeyapp.net/kb/about-general-faq/general-questions http://support.hockeyapp.net/kb/about-general-faq/general-qu...
- Pephers 12y ago
  I found it quite easy to find on the front page of their website, http://hockeyapp.net/features http://hockeyapp.net/features.

160 points by davidbarker 12y ago

This is really interesting. Microsoft has HockeyApp and Apple has TestFlight. I wonder if this is a push on their part to enhance the testing tooling available for Windows Phone.

binarymax 12y ago
Microsoft's strategy is shifting away from Windows Phone only, and is working hard on getting their non-windows software stack on all devices. While it will probably help windows phone tooling, Microsoft is painfully aware of the small market share WP has compared to iOS and Android.

bugsense 12y ago

Wow, this was unexpected, congrats to HockeyApp team! What they have built is impressive. No VC funding, no bs, just awesome work and great community.

andyjohnson0 12y ago

I just signed-up with HockeyApp this morning and have been very impressed with the experience. Congratulations to the team! Previously we'd been using TestFlight for iOS and the PLsy Store's built-in beta-test functionality for Android, but it is convenient to have one service that supports a range of mobile OSs and a lower-friction deployment process. When TestFlight was bought by Apple, they fairly quickly abandoned support for non-iOS pltforms. I'm confident that Microsoft isn't short-sighted enough to do something similar.

NicoJuicy 12y ago
Microsoft realizes it has to be cross platform... Most important change since the new CEO arrived :)
- scholia 12y ago
  Except that change was already well under way long before the new CEO arrived ;-)
  - NicoJuicy 12y ago
    They didn't went all in ( Office = milk cow), they did a huge shift now with Satya Nadella. That is a fundemental change vs. a change from the inside ( before it was pushed because some people grasped the concept and they were allowed to try it out)
    - nailer 12y ago
      Yeah it was shortly after Satya taking over that MS Office for iPad was released. They'd obviously had the code there, but the authority to actually get it out seemed to be lacking.
      - blumkvist 12y ago
        No, they just needed the new face to kick things off, so everybody can attribute the change and believe. EEE. Watch and learn. This is why Microsoft will never die, no matter how hard some people's wishful thinking.
        scholia 12y ago
        Sad but true. Ballmer could have done the same things but wouldn't have got the same response. It generally takes Microsoft years to do things. Anyone who doesn't realize all this stuff was already a long way down the pipeline needs hitting with a cluestick ;-)
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Except that change was already well under way long before the new CEO arrived Nadella didn't emerge out of nowhere, he was already an executive at Microsoft and was driving many of the kinds of changes that have accelerated since he became CEO even before becoming CEO.
chillax 12y ago
From: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/12/08/microsoft-acquires-hockeyapp-leading-mobile-crash-analytics-and-beta-distribution-service-for-ios-android-and-windows-phone.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/12/08/microso... "We will integrate HockeyApp into the Application Insights service in Visual Studio Online to expand Application Insights support for iOS and Android." Seems to me they're positioning themselves for more cross platform development.

wclax04 12y ago

Congrats guys. We use HockeyApp and love it!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

woogle 12y ago

I'm not sure it is a good news. In one hand it's great to hear that Analytics will be added and cross support is still important. But in the other hand, it puts developers in inconfortable position. Should we still use HockeyApp for our iOS apps? Depend on a tool owned by a concurrent of your target platform is not so safe on a long term sight..

untog 12y ago
I'm not too worried about it. After all, MS has released Office on iOS, and partnered with Xamarin for iOS development. They'd be insane to buy HockeyApp then kill everything it has and replace it with a Windows Phone only solution. It's weird, but MS is almost one of the best large companies to do cross-platform dev with these days.
- woogle 12y ago
  I agree with that, but things may be different in 2 years. And MS is also the company that gains the most money with each Android phone sold.
  - scholia 12y ago
    Microsoft has also been providing software for Macs since 1984, when it appeared at the launch, and it generally makes more money per head from Mac users (who buy lots of copies of Windows and Office) than Windows users (roughly $45 each per 4-5 years). The only reason it would quit on iOS is if it couldn't make any money from iOS users. And the only reason it wouldn't be able to make money from iOS users would be if Apple went down in flames.
    - potatolicious 12y ago
      > "Microsoft has also been providing software for Macs since 1984, when it appeared at the launch, and it generally makes more money per head from Mac users (who buy lots of copies of Windows and Office) than Windows users (roughly $45 each per 4-5 years)." All true, but that hasn't prevented the quality of MS software on Macs from varying between first class and complete bottom of the barrel. Right now iOS/OSX seems to be enjoying high priority at Microsoft, but this hasn't always been the case, even when Macs were popular. Normally I'd say that this is all fairly inconsequential, but HockeyApp is a very core part of our development process and build system, and disentangling ourselves of it is going to be a lot more complicated than, say, swapping analytics providers. Definitely not something you can do on a dime, which makes any potential sudden moves pretty concerning. And post-acquisition startups (regardless of who acquired them) tend to be full of sudden moves...

tehcodez 12y ago

Remember when Apple bought test flight? That sure worked out well for people building apps for multiple platforms. I'm sufficiently concerned.

smackfu 12y ago
I really doubt Microsoft is going to make it Windows Phone only. Windows Phone is just not that valuable as a platform.
- scholia 12y ago
  Windows Phone and tablet software is free as in beer ;-)
scholia 12y ago
Apple uses software to sell hardware, and usually stops supporting other platforms when it buys things. That's how its closed, proprietary world works. Microsoft makes its money from software not hardware, and most of it comes via third parties not direct sales. It licenses most of its software across multiple brands of hardware, and it's been supporting non-Windows platforms (in the form of Mac OS and iOS) for a long time. It's already hosting Linux on Azure. It's not going to close off markets for doctrinaire reasons, only if there's no money in them...

CmonDev 12y ago

I was afraid it's another of those HTML5 hybrid providers, but it's actually something useful.

gtop 12y ago

Awesome, hope they keep supporting iOS and Android distribution.

pistle 12y ago
It fits nicely within the dev story around getting .net and C# running across platforms along with the Xamarin partnership. With testflight evaporating, this is a logical acquisition. Does it make sense to keep it open to native devs? Sure. They can have ramps placed in front of them for using Azure and various telemetry solutions.

dharma1 12y ago

Also used to use Testflight when they still did Android, and signed up with Hockey App yesterday. Hope the Microsoft acquisition doesn't mean that I'll have to find another beta testing platform again!

OneDrive 12y ago

This looks cool. Is there anything similar provide free personal account?

coldcode 12y ago

Been using Beta by Crashlytics since Apple screwed up TestFlight. If MS does continue to support iOS maybe I will switch to that.

faizmokhtar 12y ago
How is your experience so far? Is it much easier? Been using Crashlytics mainly for the crash reports, never tried anything else.
- coldcode 12y ago
  I use it for Enterprise apps mostly to send to myself. Internally we have a website where people can get our apps but for testing on multiple devices it's OK. Haven't tried it on a lot of users though. TestFlight was awesome but now it's mostly horrible once Apple made it so painful.

danabramov 12y ago

HockeyApp is awesome. They're very supportive, and the tooling itself is very good. Happy for them!

brianobush 12y ago

Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with hockey...

Avalaxy 12y ago
Not even with ice hockey!
guiomie 12y ago
Ahaha. Yah I was surprised to see no relation. Or perhaps there is one that we don't know ? I thought maybe they were a Canadian company, but they don't seem to be...
skyebook 12y ago
I believe I've read in the past that its a play on "Ad-Hoc". Yes, also disappointed its not about hockey.
jeremy_wiebe 12y ago
If they aren't hockey related, at least they could have gone all out with hockey branding and terminology!

vm 12y ago

Microsoft is back for acquisitions! This is good for everyone working on tech startups. Recent buys: Acompli - Dec 1, $200M / Aorato - Nov 13, $200M / Equivio - Oct 8, $200M / Mojang (Minecraft) - Sept 15, $2.5B Microsft even started accepting Bitcoin today and recently did a major BD deal with Dropbox. Zombie no more.

neves 12y ago

Hey, the business reason to buy it is clear. Nobody develops for Windows Phone, but everybody has the burden to develop for two plataforms: iOS and Android. If MS lower the burden and automatically makes it very, very easy to develop for Windows Phone, they will finally have some decent software in their plataform.

hluska 12y ago
That's a good, concise explanation of a potential strategy. Excellent job!
bugsense 12y ago
MS will buy Xamarin next. VS is free now, you will deploy your app to tester with Hockey, test it, monitor it and then offer you Azure Mobile Services
- Immortalin 12y ago
  MS won't buy Xamarin unless someone else is planning to buy it. They probably have some sort of exclusive agreement to give MS priority when buying. It is simply cheaper for MS to let Xamarin run itself than to take it under the wing of MS.
  - scholia 12y ago
    True. Also, Xamarin/Mono already gets all kinds of crap from Linux purists and being owned by Microsoft would probably made that worse....
realharo 12y ago
I've always wondered, if MS want more apps to support their platform, how come they're the only mobile OS (including the obscure ones) that doesn't support OpenGL ES? Way to shoot themselves in the foot...

neves 12y ago

hdivider 12y ago

Great news. What I love about HockeyApp (vs TestFlight) is that I don't really have to bother with the App Store Review Guidelines. Makes testing much faster. Plus, they show they care when it comes to integration: tons of help, plus a special wizard to make it easy.

thijser 12y ago

It's interesting to see the consolidation in this space. HockeyApp is the #2 most used crash reporting library for Android according to our stats: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/crash-reporting/android-crash-reporting-libraries http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/crash-reporting/... The #1, crashlytics, was acquired in early 2013 by Twitter, and BugSense was acquired by Splunk.

robertwalsh0 12y ago

"What browsers work with HockeyApp? We have developed and tested with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari." Kinda funny.

maresca 12y ago

I had used HockeyApp for 3 months while testing my current set of mobile apps. I had used it to test an iPhone app and it was terribly painful. Those pains were mostly from Apple's end though. Once I had found out Apple bought TestFlight, I canceled my HockeyApp subscription. Does anyone have any input on the comparison of HockeyApp and Play Store beta testing for the testing process of android apps?

sreejithr 12y ago

"When we founded our company, our intent and mission was to always stay indie." You sold out, dude.

tdicola 12y ago
Everyone has a price. Everyone.
- busterarm 12y ago
  Especially me. I'm even cheap!
Lightbody 12y ago
You say it like it's some mark of shame. They built a product, found success, a bigger company wanted it, and then found more success via acquisition. What's wrong with that?
- _random_ 12y ago
  He identified a strong discrepancy between their vision and their decision. What's wrong with that?

filmgirlcw 12y ago

Congrats to Michael and team on this! After Apple bought TestFlight and relaunched their testing offering this year at WWDC, it was clear Hockey would have a problem competing in the Apple device space (even though I think their product is superior to what TestFlight was -- haven't used the new TestFlight enough to compare). The tools are great for users and developers and I think this will be great for Microsoft. Glad to see it end up in good hands. Truly a great service.

kyberias 12y ago

It wasn't easy to find out what HockeyApp actually does. Here's some information buried in their site: http://support.hockeyapp.net/kb/about-general-faq/general-questions http://support.hockeyapp.net/kb/about-general-faq/general-qu...

Pephers 12y ago
I found it quite easy to find on the front page of their website, http://hockeyapp.net/features http://hockeyapp.net/features.