Apple has acquired a Canadian based IOS app tools startup Buddybuild for an undisclosed amount as the tech giant aims to further consolidate its app revenue. This is the second big acquisition by Apple in less than a month, after it acquired the music discovery app Shazam last month. The entire team of Buddybuild will join Apple’s coding platform Xcode. However, the startup will continue to operate from its Vancouver headquarter.
Following the accusation, Buddybuild will stop accepting new customers from 1st March while all the existing customers will continue to enjoy the services uninterrupted. It will also discontinue all its services to Android app developers.
As stated on its official website, Buddybuild essentially helps in faster and efficient development of IOS apps. It allows IOS app developers to run a UI & beta test and simultaneously offers a secure environment to build a proficient app.
With this acquisition, Apple has once again declared its serious intent to more than double its app revenue by 2020. The tech giant will most certainly look to capitalize on this latest acquisition in order to create more sellable IOS apps and eventually pose a greater challenge to Andriod’s Google Play Store. Google Play Store continues to dominate the app market despite the tough competition from Apple’s app store, which is obviously causing lot of anguish for the iPhone maker.
However, 2017 proved to be an unusually good year for Apple’s app store, since for the first time it overtook its closest rival. This is according to App Annie report, which claims that Apple garnered revenue of approximately $11 billion in the third quarter of last year while Android managed to clock only $6 billion in the same period.
Many Industry experts continue to argued that since IOS is a closed operating system, it won’t exactly dominate the app market like Android, which is an open source operating system.