Nitobi and PhoneGap’s new home at Adobe | October 4th, 2011
This is a very exciting time in the industry and for our team. However, it’s also a time of great change which is often met with skepticism and possibly some fear. Let’s get to the point: PhoneGap and all the code that makes it awesome is staying free and open source. Maybe more so than ever with our contribution to the Apache Software Foundation.
I feel the team at Nitobi and the rest of the of our contributors did a great job getting PhoneGap to where it is today. We shipped 1.0 this summer and have been making great progress since, in fact we just shipped PhoneGap 1.1 last week. It’s time to step on the gas and accelerate development of the platform, both from our team (now Adobe:)) and the wider community, which is why we’re putting PhoneGap in the Apache Software Foundation.
The issue of cross-platform app development is just now hitting mainstream attention and PhoneGap will come under increasing competitive threats. We think building on an open platform is essential to ensuring the web wins, and under Apache we can collaborate with all those who share this vision. No doubt we will compete with others and now we can do so with the support of Adobe, another company firmly committed to the web and cross platform tools and solutions.
We’ve built Nitobi on a bootstrap. We’ve built other great products over the years but now we’re on to something bigger and bolder. It’s really a movement around building apps and services with web technologies that run everywhere. We now need to focus our whole team on PhoneGap, PhoneGap Build and other tooling around HTML5 and JS development. The web and technologies that support it need fostering and support in an open manner. I’m excited to work on that!
We’re also launching PhoneGap Build with the help of a team that’s been building something awesome—cloud tools and infrastructure on top of Amazon Web Services. We’re committed to pushing forward with more cloud-based tooling and services that will help developers. We announced PhoneGap Build is in open beta last week and we’re getting ready to roll out for full on prime-time commercial use soon. We’ll be adding features and fixing bugs every day as usual. We’ll be honouring all existing client projects, support and training. We may be finding other partners and solutions to help deliver those services that are vital to the eco-system. Otherwise, it’s business as usual!
The whole team is moving to Adobe and this was very important to me. Some of us will move to SF to have more influence in the Adobe mothership and some of us will stay in Vancouver to continue to grow and foster the culture around the PhoneGap project that’s made it so great. I’m going to SF which is a great opportunity but I’ll miss the Vancouver office Kegerator. It’s really still just the beginning for PhoneGap and our team. The Nitobi team is amazing and they are some of the most talented, smart, creative, loyal and funny group of people I’ve ever worked with. I’m looking forward to continuing our journey together.
At Adobe, we will be able to focus and work together more closely than ever without the constraints and distractions you have when running a small business. I’m also excited to be joining some of the smartest minds in the industry at Adobe. Their contributions to open source and the web have largely flown under the radar. Adobe has 2 contributors to the WebKit project and have played a key role in the jQuery Mobile project. Now you tell me that WebKit + jQuery + PhoneGap don’t make up the most killer trio in the mobile web and app space. If you doubt Adobe’s intentions, it’s important to consider how Adobe makes money—it’s from tools, services and solutions not shipping runtimes.
Oh ya and given that I’m moving to California…I’ll probably learn how to surf too;-)
October 4th, 2011 at 7:04 pm
[...] ha infatti donato il progetto alla Apache Software Foundation, come dice il fondatore di Nitobi sul suo Blog, non è su questo che Adobe basa il suo business, ma su Strumenti, Servizi e [...]
October 4th, 2011 at 7:06 pm
[...] Nitobi and PhoneGap’s new home at Adobe | October 4th, 2011 [...]
October 4th, 2011 at 8:41 pm
That’s exciting news. Makes a lot of sense for Adobe to acquire Nitobi.
October 4th, 2011 at 8:49 pm
Congrats Andre, and team Nitobi.
October 4th, 2011 at 9:53 pm
[...] open source software for cross-platform mobile application building with HTML5 and JavaScript. In a blog, Nitobi CEO Andre Charland pledged to pursue donation of the PhoneGap code to the Apache S…”to ensure open stewardship of the project over the long term.” In a statement, he said [...]
October 5th, 2011 at 8:28 am
[...] open source software for cross-platform mobile application building with HTML5 and JavaScript. In a blog, Nitobi CEO Andre Charland pledged to pursue donation of the PhoneGap code to the Apache S…”to ensure open stewardship of the project over the long term.” In a statement, he said [...]
October 5th, 2011 at 8:55 am
Congratulations!
October 5th, 2011 at 11:44 am
Congratulations!
October 5th, 2011 at 12:42 pm
I trust this will provide nitobi the direct path from Adobe to the Google Android team you richly deserve.
Best of luck in the next phase with Adobe.
October 6th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
Ocean Beach here you come!! And make sure to stop by Summitsf in the mission. You’ll love it down here. But enjoy that Indian, sushi, and Thai food in Vancouver while you can! :)
October 7th, 2011 at 7:22 am
[...] do projeto serão transferidas para a fundação Apache. Andre Charland, CEO da Nitobi, explica que a Adobe não ganha dinheiro com royalties sobre runtimes, mas com ferramentas, serviços e [...]
October 7th, 2011 at 10:40 am
Congrats. Excited to see the things to come.
By the way…. more surfing in Southern California. :-)
October 10th, 2011 at 4:46 am
It is great to see a small business (with big project) having the opportunity of growing bigger and being able to focus on one product. First, when I head the news, I had my doubts, but then I remembered the contribution Adobe’s making to the open source community.
It’s great to have the ability to focus on just one project which will make the products better for us the developers.
October 10th, 2011 at 8:01 pm
Wow. Congrats! Thank you for keeping PhoneGap open and free. I look forward to seeing more contributions around WebKit + jQuery + PhoneGap. Yes they do rock.
October 10th, 2011 at 8:49 pm
[...] Nitobi and PhoneGap’s new home at Adobe [...]
October 19th, 2011 at 11:09 pm
Hope Adobe doesn’t ruin the project like it did with several companies it bought in the past. The Flash Player was doing just fine but after some time in the hand of Adobe bugs started to invade it. It is unacceptable that many computers still don’t have GPU accelerated video, millons are watching YouTube videos in such an inefficient player.
There’s even a bug in all Flah Player video players running in Mac OS: when you pause a video, go to another browser tab and come back, when you click play it doesn’t work, you have to move the mark in the timeline and then the video will resume. This has been happening for almost a year and there’s no fix. It affects millons of users and Adobe still doesn’t fix it. I can also write several paragraphs about Adobe Reader huge security vulnerabilities which Adobe takes unacceptable amount of time to fix.
An so on……
Even after all that, I still use several Adobe products but only because they’re industry standard, even almost a monopoly in some cases. In general creative software by Adobe is very good but I just wish Adobe took fixing huge bugs like they have across they whole portfolio of software more seriously. For example, several Creative Suite programs which have tabs for files had a huge bug in which you have to click twice a tab to make the switch. I remember reporting this bug and all Adobe said was “we can’t reproduce the problem so we can’t fix it”… even after HUNDREDS of users joined my bug report it took Adobe the whole CS3 and CS4 cycle to fix it only at CS5… again: unacceptable for programs that are that expensive.
So, hope this is just an annoying post and I’m completely wrong but there’s a tendency I just can’t ignore even I wish I could.
October 20th, 2011 at 12:45 am
That is great news. Seems, Adobe is really serious with HTML5 and now aquiring Nitobi and Phonegap will provide us, the developers, a good reason to smile more.
October 27th, 2011 at 10:21 pm
hi,
i am new PhoneGap Dev, if i have a problem with my project how can i post my question…who can tell me about this, thank u for advance….