Airbnb, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Peloton, Robinhood, Slack, Spotify and Uber, among other companies, have created the Mobile Native Foundation (MNF), an initiative that wants to promote the creation of open source development tools for mobile app development.
This initiative is under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes innovation through open source. With MNF it is intended to create a common space where developers can improve processes and technologies that support Android and iOS applications on a large scale.
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Multiple Microsoft support
Among the founding members of the initiative there are big names in consumer technologies, such as Lyft, Uber, Airbnb or Peloton, but also business software providers. Among them, Microsoft and its subsidiaries GitHub and LinkedIn stand out. There is also Slack or Square.
Mike Borysenko, Microsoft engineer, assures that the company sees this alliance “as a great opportunity to collaborate in a more inclusive way on the challenges we face in the industry” and is convinced that it will lead to “improvements in the mobile development “that is achieved” when we all work together.
It should also be remembered that although years ago there was a lot of rivalry between Microsoft and Linux environments, for years the company founded by Bill Gates has been a supporter and collaborator with free software. Something that has also received the blessings of the founder of Linux, Linus Torvalds.
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The Mobile Native Foundation will allow participating companies to pool their resources. Instead of creating separate large-scale application development tools, group members can now collaborate on a common set of open source projects.
Stop duplicating work
According to Keith Smiley, a Lyft plant engineer, they realized that, although there are many open source tools that aim to make it easier to create applications for iOS and Android, these proposals “did not solve all the problems that we faced when our mobile team grew from a dozen engineers to hundreds of active collaborators. ”The challenge, then, is for the Mobile Native Foundation to foster collaboration between all its members and the creation of common tools and libraries from which everyone can benefit.
There are several areas in particular that the Mobile Native Foundation will try to focus on. Some plans go through developing tools that can facilitate the creating user interfaces and network functions for mobile applications.
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They will also seek to create related resources such as industry standards, best practices, and architectural patterns.
According to its promoters, MNF is a collaborative forum on open source software, standards and best practices, so that it is also speed time to market and reduce duplicate work in companies.
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