Beam: the open source Reddit client for iOS
We’ve been working on Beam for many years and almost everyday, we learned something new from creating our own iOS Reddit client. In addition, we learned to know it as a product and what we needed it to be. But the last four years have shown us that Beam can be so much more. More than just one of the several Reddit clients on the App Store. That’s why we decided to open source Beam for Reddit.
As we mentioned before, open source software caught our attention this year. It was the first time that we publicly released open source projects. Projects that ranged from small to slightly bigger, but nothing you could call large. Until now. But why open source Beam? Well, multiple reasons actually.
- We’re not the most experienced company in the world of open source software, but we’d love to be. We still lack experience that only a ‘larger’ open source project can bring, like, building a community, handling support issues on a large scale or working together with an existing userbase. There are so many things that we haven’t done before. It’s our intention to learn from Beam, just like we always did.
- We want to support open source software the best way we can; by doing it. Our objective is to build products that people will use. It’s our contribution to the open source community. We hope this will put Awkward on the map as a company that supports open source software. Releasing a product like Beam might help us do the trick.
- It’s hard to realize that you can’t keep up with a product roadmap, because of the combined workload of your company. It means that a product that you love isn’t receiving the attention it should. This happened to Beam as well. By open sourcing Beam, we’re giving anyone the option and ability to contribute, which can help us release regular updates.
And we will. Working on Beam has been a pleasure and we won’t stop any time soon. We welcome you to contribute to our project. Visit our GitHub page for more information.
