Fastlane has slowly resurfaced in the news, ironically, as an application nobody is talking about. 

An open-source toolkit, the platform helps automate the process of creating mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms. 

Created by Felix Krause in 2014, the company was acquired by Twitter a year later. In 2017, Google acquired multiple technology development platforms from Twitter, and Fastlane was one of them, alongside Fabric, Crashlytics, and Digits. Since then, Google has supported Fastlane to continuously develop new features. 

Fastlane has been helping Google and companies alike in automating building, testing, and deploying applications – run with a single command. But now, Google seems to be least concerned about Fastlane. 

As per Josh Holtz, a developer from Fastlane, Google has not sponsored the application since the end of November 2021, and though Google still owns it, the community “does all the work”. This has got tongues wagging on whether Google is looking to abandon Fastlane. 

Why Google Sidelined Fastlane

Fastlane saw a decline of 14,000 unique visitors in December, but was followed by a spike of 11,000 unique users in January. So far, the total unique users stand at 45,831. However, it’s not just one platform, but the entire industry that is struggling to gain traction. There are various DevOps companies, which work on similar services like Fastlane, that continue to see a decline or register a bare minimum growth in monthly users.

AppCircle, a platform founded in 2019, works on CI/CD environments that help with the development of apps similar to Fastlane. AppCircle took a hit in the past two months, recording a decline of over 5,000 users as per Similarweb. Cloud-based integration developer CodeMagic, founded in 2017, has monthly visits of over 3,00,000. The platform saw a slight decline in users in January as opposed to the growth observed in December 2022 (+43000 users). The largest traffic comes from India contributing to 11.63% of total users. 

While the app automation platforms are observing a decline, LC/NC automation in the DevOps process is gaining traction. To adopt Agile systems and reduce dependency on developers, enterprises are looking to increasingly adopt LC/NC. This is a rising trend with tech companies such as Microsoft moving towards low code platforms. The global market size for low-code development platforms is set to grow from $13.2 billion to $45.5 billion by 2028. 

GitHub Rushes to the Rescue  

Fastlane is on GitHub, but Google’s apathy has made it difficult to sponsor or add new maintainers. There have been no updates on the same. Amid the inactivity, a proposal of moving Fastlane to MNF (mobile native foundation) has been initiated by Peter Steinberger on GitHub. MNF is a place for collaborating open-source projects and improving processes and technologies for Android and iOS applications. 

Steinberger also discussed the inactivity of Fastlane on Twitter, which led the lead maintainer of Fastlane, Josh Holtz, to release a version that kind of got the buzz going. By moving Fastlane to MNF, a supposed revival can be expected. 

UnGoogled Future

Google is infamous for killing projects after they gain traction. Last month, Google shut down Stadia, a cloud gaming service. Google will also shut down Google Cloud IoT Core, which hosts partner-led solutions for its IoT customers, in August of this year. 

Akin to adopting and abandoning employees, Google has acquired multiple companies in the past with the aim of investing in them and growing them, but eventually dropped the project – a sign of poor future vision. The abandonment of products also reflects failed opportunities the companies might have had. Google had shut down operations for Hire, a service introduced to help human resource personnel track and communicate with job candidates. The company said that though Hire was successful, the “resources will focus on other products in Google Cloud portfolio”.

For now, it looks like with the Bard fiasco, Fastlane is one of the least of Google’s worries.