Partnership with BitStadium + HockeyApp

May 31, 2013, by Landon Fuller

Since our first release of PLCrashReporter in 2008, it has come to be relied upon by analytics companies, developer tools providers, and internal corporate crash reporting services. We believe that PLCrashReporter is unrivaled as a reliable, stable, well-tested, and carefully constructed crash reporting tool.

Almost since the beginning, HockeyApp’s developers have contributed to the development of PLCrashReporter — contributing patches, developing both open-source and commercial services around it, and ultimately, funding the development of additional open-source features.

We are very excited to announce a long-term joint partnership between our two companies. This partnership will allow us to focus development efforts on further improving and expanding the reach of PLCrashReporter, as well as developing new features, services, and improvements for HockeyApp’s server and client products. The first result of this partnership will be the release of the next generation open source PLCrashReporter. Exclusive early access for HockeyApp customers and details are coming soon!

HockeyApp and Plausible Labs share a combined vision regarding the future of PLCrashReporter. We genuinely believe that complex tools such as PLCrashReporter should be open-source, in the same way that Apple provides kernel, compiler, and library sources, as to allow for peer review and validation of the approaches we have taken in our technical implementation. Integrators — whether they be application developers or platform providers — should be certain of the robustness of the software, that there is no use of private API or poor implementation that could harm their business or their customer’s interests.

To support this vision, we are launching plcrashreporter.org, a dedicated open-source project, administered by Plausible Labs. It is our goal to ensure that PLCrashReporter remains a trustworthy, free, and open-source solution to crash reporting on iOS, Mac OS X, and — in coming months — future platforms. We will also be founding the PLCrashReporter Consortium (modeled on SQLite’s), with the goal of sharing resources to fund the ongoing open-source development of PLCrashReporter.

HockeyApp is joining the PLCrashReporter Consortium as its founding member, and we look forward to other companies that rely on PLCrashReporter joining in supporting the project’s ongoing open-source development.