Shadow makes its first acquisition by announcing that it will snatch up Genymobile, the company behind Genymotion. Shadow is best known for its cloud computing service which works particularly well for cloud gaming. It also offers a cloud storage service based on Nextcloud.
As for Genymobile, the French startup has been around for more than a decade. He specialized in low-level Android development. And in particular, he developed a popular Android emulator so developers can test their apps on multiple setups and under different scenarios.
Terms of the agreement are not disclosed. Genymobile co-founder and CTO Arnaud Dupuis will remain with the company and act as Genymobile’s chief executive from March 1. Genymobile’s current CEO, Tim Danford, will step back from day-to-day business and move into an advisory role.
“We are very pleased to announce this acquisition as the relationship established last year with Genymobile has been critical to our progress in developing the next generation of our service,” Shadow CEO Eric Sèle said in a statement. . “This acquisition will bring additional expertise to Shadow, and will also show our ambition as a company, which will go through internal and external growth.”
Genymotion started out as a desktop emulator for Android development. Businesses could pay a subscription price to run virtual appliances on their computer. More recently, the company started offering a hosted version of the Genymotion emulation. Genymobile takes care of the server infrastructure while you can use your web browser to interact with your app.
Enterprise customers can also use Genymotion to run Android virtual devices on their preferred cloud platform: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud or on premise.
Moving to the cloud means you can use Genymotion for automated testing and trigger those tests with your continuous integration system. For example, whenever you create a new release, CircleCI or GitHub Actions can run tests on Genymotion to make sure your new release doesn’t break anything.
Developers receive an alert if something goes wrong. In addition to Android development, QA teams can use Genymotion to reproduce bugs on specific devices in a specific geographic location.
Shadow recently launched its commercial service for cloud computing. Businesses can access high-performance virtual machines that run Windows Server. The service could be useful for game studios, 3D animation companies, and other industries that require powerful GPUs.
With the acquisition of Genymobile, Shadow will be able to offer access to another type of machine in the cloud — in this case, Android devices.
