Shadow acquires Android emulation startup Genymobile

Shadow is making its first acquisition as it announced that it would snatch Genymobile, the company behind Genymotion. Shadow is better known for its cloud computing service that 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. It has specialized in low-level Android development. And in particular, it has developed a popular Android emulator so that developers can test their apps on multiple configurations and following different scenarios.

Terms of the deal are undisclosed. Genymobile’s co-founder and CTO Arnaud Dupuis will stay at the company and act as the chief executive of Genymobile starting March 1st. Genymobile’s existing CEO Tim Danford will step back from the company’s day-to-day activities and move to an advisor role.

“We are very happy to announce this acquisition as the relationship built this past year with Genymobile has been pivotal to our progress in the development of the next-coming generation of our service,” Shadow CEO Eric Sèle said in a statement. “This acquisition will bring additional expertise to Shadow, and also showcases our ambition as a company, which will go through both internal and external growth.”

Genymotion started as a desktop emulator for Android development. Companies could pay a subscription price to run virtual devices on their computer. More recently, the company started offering a hosted version of Genymotion emulation. Genymobile takes care of the server infrastructure while you can use your web browser to interact with your app.

Enterprise clients 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 that you can use Genymotion for automated testing and trigger those tests with your continuous integration system. For instance, every time you create a new build, CircleCI or GitHub Actions can kick off some tests on Genymotion to make sure that your new version doesn’t break anything.

Developers receive an alert if there’s something wrong. In addition to Android development, quality assurance teams can use Genymotion to reproduce bugs on specific devices in a specific geographic location.

Shadow recently launched its business service for cloud computing. Companies can access high-performance virtual machines that run Windows Server. The service could be helpful for gaming 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 that case, Android devices.

Shadow acquires Android emulation startup Genymobile by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch