Better apps through science

Our History

PLJukebox Plausible Labs has been on the forefront of iOS development from the beginning. In 2008, we released PLJukebox, an independent implementation of Apple’s “Cover Flow” image browser — a user-interface element that provided visual “jukebox-style” browsing of images. Plausible Labs used this technology to develop Peeps, a visual address book application that utilized our Cover Flow library to browse contacts. The fidelity of Plausible's independent implementation of Cover Flow was good enough that Apple mistook it for their own. The PLJukebox library was purchased for 3rd-party use in apps published by CNN, Barnes and Noble, Condé Nast Digital, Net-a-Porter, and countless independent app developers.

PLCrashReporter Originally written in 2008 to provide crash reports for Plausible's first iOS application, Peeps, and released as open-source, PLCrashReporter was the first crash reporting solution available for iOS. Today, PLCrashReporter is used by most 3rd-party crash reporting services for iOS and macOS, and can be found reporting crashes in the Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Dropbox, Yahoo Mail, Kindle, and Chase Mobile iOS apps, as well as tens of thousands of other applications. With Microsoft's purchase of HockeyApp in 2014, PLCrashReporter sits at the core of Microsoft's crash reporting solutions for Apple's platforms. And in October 2019, Plausible and Microsoft reached an agreement to transfer stewardship of PLCrashReporter to the App Center team at Microsoft, where it will continue to be developed as an open source project.

comiXology When the iPad was announced in 2010, comiXology knew it would be a huge leap forward for digital comics. Plausible Labs was commissioned by comiXology for both the design and engineering of Comics for iPad prior to the iPad’s public release. With only the aid of screenshots from Apple’s keynote presentation and a computer-simulated iPad, Plausible produced a full iPad version of Comics — specially branded in Marvel black and red — in only two weeks, just in time for the official iPad launch. The app rocketed to the top of the App Store, giving comiXology the confidence to bring their app to the next level. For the next year, Plausible Labs worked closely with comiXology, acting as their full service mobile development and design team and producing a new digital comic shopping experience for iOS and Android. The resulting Comics app became the Top Grossing iPad app — storewide — of 2012.

Piki In 2012, the folks at turntable.fm sought to create a new kind of social radio app, one that relied on the tastes of friends instead of algorithms. The new service would be called Piki, and Plausible Labs was brought on board to develop the Piki app for iOS from the ground up. Building on our experience delivering polished entertainment apps on iOS, we implemented the entirety of their iOS app, which included efficient audio streaming, smooth animated transitions, an extensive onboarding flow, and social features like listener-friendly “reactions” that went beyond the typical thumbs-up systems of the day.

HockeyApp In 2013, Plausible Labs entered into a revenue sharing partnership with HockeyApp, a complete platform to manage crash reports, beta distribution, and beta user groups across the lifecycle of an application. As part of the arrangement, Plausible Labs developed a new uploader for HockeyApp that greatly simplified the process of configuring new app updates to gather crash reports.

pingmd Plausible Labs was contracted by pingmd in 2014 to help build their iOS and Android apps, as well as backend server code. pingmd is a secure, HIPAA-compliant medical messaging app for intelligent doctor-patient and doctor-doctor communications. As part of this work, Plausible Labs built major parts of the user interface and data storage in the apps, as well as a WebRTC-based video calling feature.

PLRelational While constructing the next major release of VoodooPad, Plausible Labs uncovered a different style of programming, one that simplifies development by leaning on relational algebra in unique ways. This approach was so useful in the development of VoodooPad — reducing code complexity while enabling new ways for users to interconnect their data — that we packaged it all up into a Swift framework called PLRelational and released it as an open source project in 2017.

FreeBSD Not just a mobile development company: we also became the primary authors of FreeBSD's bhnd(4) driver family in 2016, which provides a unified bus interface and platform drivers for Broadcom's Wi-Fi chipsets and SoCs, and was used to bring up the FreeBSD/MIPS Broadcom port. Our future plans include using bhnd(4) to expand FreeBSD's Broadcom Wi-Fi support, as well as bringing up a port of FreeBSD to Broadcom ARM SoCs such as are commonly found in Wi-Fi Access Points.

Upthere Between late 2017 and mid 2019, we helped the team at Upthere (acquired by Western Digital) to bridge a complex technology gap by developing a novel pipeline for using their highly custom client-side C++ libraries from TypeScript-based (React Native and Electron) applications. We also filled the tech lead role for their native iOS development team, implemented front- and backend features in their mobile apps, and provided guidance on client-side cloud storage strategy as Upthere made the transition to React Native development within Western Digital.

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