And it took just 11 years since the launch of the platform! GitHub, now under Microsoft, has finally released an iOS app only a year after it was acquired by the software titan.
GitHub executives had long maintained that mobile was not a top priority for the company. It rocked on more than a decade without an iPhone application, preferring to keep its service in the browser saying that people generally engage in more intensive software development work on desktop computers.
But that is all changing now.
The company shared the good news in a blog post, revealing why this change of heart came to be:
“There’s a lot you can do on GitHub that doesn’t require a complex development environment, like sharing feedback on a design discussion and reviewing a few lines of code. Now we are making these tasks easy for you to perform, no matter where you work, with a beautifully native experience.”
Okay.
The official iOS app is available now as a beta release.
And it gives users on iPhone and iPad another way to share code, and also allowing them to see when people mention them in discussions. They can also accept suggestions for updating code in repositories that other users submit.
Should definitely go a long way in enabling more collaboration from mobile devices, particularly at a time when software has become a much bigger focus for Microsoft. There are several unofficial GitHub clients out in the wild that actually allow users to access their GitHub data from mobile devices.
But an official app is the real deal, particularly when it is as well designed as this one.
No concrete details on when an official Android app makes an appearance, but it has been confirmed that a new one is certainly coming soon.
In the meantime, keep an eye on this here space.
