Open Sourcing Buglife for iOS & Android
At Buglife, we make an awesome SDK & web platform for reporting bugs from within iOS & Android apps. Today we’re excited to open source our iOS & Android SDKs!
Why open source?
So our engineers could show off their 10x coding skills. So we could get those GitHub stars. So we could get others to do our work for us.
Just kidding, of course.
Our team was initially iffy about open source. Then one day, our friend Felix wrote a tweet that caught our attention:
Felix is a thought leader of sorts, so we huddled:
“Should we open-source?”
“Dunno, flip a coin.”
Nobody in the office had any coins, so we downloaded a coin-flipping app. Ironically, we couldn’t be completely certain that our coin-flipping app wasn’t biased due to it being closed source. Thus we decided to go ahead and open source Buglife.
But seriously, why open source?
Trust
One of our goals in building Buglife was to avoid all the things developers hate about 3rd-party SDKs: Bloat. Method swizzling. Performance & stability degradation. Non-idiomatic API design.
We built Buglife to shine in all aspects, even under the hood. Just one problem: most of this was completely invisible to developers.
With Buglife being open source, developers can now see first-hand that we’re good citizens.
Extensibility
The Buglife SDK largely consists of user interface. Users take a screenshot of an app, which subsequently presents an in-app bug reporter UI. Naturally, developers like to customize every aspect of this UI to make it feel at home within their apps.
We’ve put a lot of thought & energy into building carefully crafted APIs for customizing the bug reporter UI. But being good citizens means respecting even the most granular design choices of host applications.
With open source Buglife, you can finally go crazy and add a texture of rich corinthian leather to your app’s in-app bug reporter.
Community
Our mission is to help teams make better apps. Building the most awesome bug reporting tools is just one way we can do that.
The Buglife team takes pride in craftsmanship; we obsess over everything from user interface design to engineering best practices. Through this we’ve learned a ton, and now we can share the things we’ve learned with others currently building apps (and SDKs!).
With open source Buglife, we hope our SDK can become a source of knowledge & education, as well as inspire teams to build even higher quality apps.
What’s next?
Working openly means we can loop users into our product development cycle much earlier, which enables us to build even better bug reporting tools. After all, we are a feedback tool; It’d be crazy for us not relentlessly seek feedback on the tool itself.
Looking for a new feature? Submit a GitHub issue! Looking to contribute? Submit a pull request! If you’re already active in the open source space, then we don’t have to tell you how this stuff works. And if you’re not, watch the GitHub repos below for more info!
We can’t wait to see what you’re building with (or on top of) Buglife. It’s a tremendous opportunity to change the way users report feedback, and directly impact the quality of apps that millions of people use everyday.
You can find our iOS & Android repositories here:
https://github.com/Buglife/Buglife-iOS
https://github.com/Buglife/buglife-android
Okay, blogging done. Back to business as usual: making the awesomest bug reporting SDK & web platform.
A special thanks to Amanda B. Hill, Alex Fu, Amrit Thakur, Delisa Mason, Eric Frohnhoefer, Felix Krause, Joe Fabisevich, and Mathew Henson.
