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The TUAW Daily Update Podcast for February 21, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Apple buys Burstly, owner of TestFlight beta-testing platform
Re/code is confirming the news first reported by TUAW sister site TechCrunch that Apple has purchased Burstly. The company is best known for mobile analytics tool FlightPath, and acquired TestFlight in 2012. Burstly also provides the SkyRocket ad monetization service. iOS beta testers and developers alike are quite familiar with TestFlight, which is used to distribute pre-release versions of apps to limited audiences for beta testing purposes. TechCrunch reported that on Wednesday, TestFlight announced that it would be dropping Android support as of March 21 as well as discontinuing its TestFlight SDK. TechCrunch also noted that FlightPath, which never made it past beta, has also been shut down. Links to FlightPath began being redirected to the TestFlight home page on about February 11. At this point, nobody is quite sure what plans Apple has for Burstly and TestFlight, but we're sure to hear more details as time passes ... perhaps not until the 2014 WorldWide Developer Conference.
Burstly restructures, now offers three services for code-to-ship functionality
Burstly acquired the beta testing service TestFlight just a few months ago, and TestFlight released a mobile analytics service called FlightPath soon after that. Now, Burstly has announced that it is restructuring its offerings, to set up a full set of services to take developers from developing and testing their app with TestFlight, to preforming analytics with FlightPath, and then monetizing with Burstly's tools, now rebranded as SkyRocket. This is a smart bit of revamping -- TestFlight is very popular, but FlightPath has just started out and SkyRocket's name is brand new to most developers, so combining these tools under the same umbrella should make them all more accessible to developers. All of these services are still available separately, but not only do they share a parent company now, but they also can combine functionality, such as having high profile users from FlightPath get offered different monetization options or deals via SkyRocket. Burstly's wasting no time making its TestFlight acquisition useful. We'll stay tuned to see, going forward, how this trio of services plays with mobile developers.
Burstly acquires TestFlight, builds "TestFlight Live"
TestFlight and Burstly shook up the developer world today when the pair confirmed that TestFlight has been acquired by Burstly. TestFlight is a platform that lets developers distribute test builds of their apps to a beta audience; while Burstly is platform that helps developers track and monetize their apps. Together the duo has created TestFlight Live, a new platform that'll let developers distribute their apps and track both their usage and performance. TestFlight Live is a real-time dashboard which shows overall app engagement, revenue, audience, and stability. The dashboard tracks stats like the number of unique users, number of visiting users, lists of different devices, in-app versus paid app purchases and more. It's similar to HockeyApp, another platform for distributing beta versions of applications and tracking their performance. Both TestFlight and TestFlight Live will be free for developers and developers already using TestFlight can start using the Live service now. TestFlight and Burstly plan to keep the basic framework of TestFlight Live free and will monetize the system using premium features in the future. It's compatible with Safari on the desktop, the iPad, and the iPhone. [Via PandoDaily]
