This month, Bugfender turned four years old. We didn’t throw a massive party to celebrate the birthday (the team is spread all over the world, which makes party-planning rather tricky) but we all reflected with pride on the amazing journey we’ve been on. Over the last four years we’ve watched Bugfender become a vibrant, sustainable venture. What started as a spin-out from our parent company, Mobile Jazz, is now established in its own right.
At Bugfender, we strive to keep improving. The number of smartphone users is rising all the time, as is the number of smartphone models. So the challenge of fixing bugs is getting increasingly difficult. So it’s with great pride that we announce new and improved support for both Ionic and Unity.
How do you organize an effective meeting when you don’t have a physical space to hold it? How do you manage workflows across different time zones, when some people are starting work as others go to bed? How do you integrate new people into the culture when you don’t have a physical HR department?
In the development world, we’re constantly being bombarded by new innovations with the potential to change our world. 5G, augmented reality, machine learning… there’s probably never been a more fertile and exciting time to be a developer.
Since starting out in 2011, we at Mobile Jazz have been privileged to build some of the world’s most popular apps, accumulating a combined total of over 500 million downloads across all our products. When dealing with apps of this reach and popularity, testing is crucial: a slight glitch that sneaks through the QA process will result in a deluge of complaints.
Each quarter, we like to share some stats about Bugfender’s usage. Here are a couple of interesting pieces...
In a hundred years’ time, when the world’s tech writers look back on our primitive technology and chart the rise of the smartphone, they’ll pinpoint three years as being crucial to the technology. The first will be 1994, which saw the release of the IBM Simon, a prototype for the smartphones we recognize today. The second will 2007, when the first iPhone went on sale. The third will be 2019.
Some products you build because you want to. Others you build because you have to. In the case of Bugfender’s brand-new plug-in for React Native, it was definitely the latter. Like the rest of the development world, we’ve come to rely on this cross-platform framework to build killer apps across Android, iOS and web. But that’s not why we’ve built our plug-in. No, it’s because our users were building their own versions!
