Laurent's journey started in 2008 as the lead developer for MacRuby, which was announced by Apple with the purpose of offering a modern and dynamic environment to develop full-fledged and efficient applications for the Mac. Since then, MacRuby saw a series of significant releases and in 2010 became a stable and viable alternative to Objective-C with the inclusion of a LLVM-based compiler.
From there, Apple released the Mac App Store, which welcomed apps written in MacRuby. Apple even shipped OS X Lion with features written in MacRuby.
Laurent Sansonetti decided to leave Apple in order to push Ruby where it has never been: Apple's mobile operating system, iOS. He decided to incorporate a company, hoping to make a living doing what he loves. The company was named HipByte.
After two years of refinement, RubyMotion 1.0 was released to the world in 2012. It quickly received a lot of praise and attention from the developer community. The ecosystem started to grow significantly, and libraries, screencasts, and books started to appear.
Soon after, RubyMotion released support for OS X application development and Android.
Amir picked up RubyMotion after quitting his soul sucking corporate job. He fell in love with the RubyMotion and created A Dark Room. This mobile game went viral, and hit the number one spot in the App Store, and the number two spot on Google Play. A RubyMotion app had conquered the world and was recognized as one of Apple's top 10 apps of 2014.
From here, Laurent and Amir became fast friends.
Amir went on to create many more chart topping apps; gaining a unique and formidable knowledge of the business of app development.
Laurent, being a hacker at heart, felt RubyMotion was battle hardened and complete. He handed over the continued maintenance and long term support of RubyMotion to Amir, who is now The Steward of this incredible platform.
RubyMotion continues it's wonderful journey under Amir's care, helping developers of all skill levels build successful, profitable mobile apps.
RubyMotion is a self-funded product. We never took outside funding and we don't plan to in the future. Since we don't have investors to report to, we can commit on supporting RubyMotion with a long-term vision, thanks to the continuous support of our awesome customers.
We are proud to be fully bootstrapped, and more importantly, we are profitable since day one.
RubyMotion has a strong stable sponsorship through Amir's apps and boutique consultancy. In the event of any catastrophic event, RubyMotion's entire codebase/intellectual property will be open sourced under a premissive, commercial friendly license. The investment you make in this platform will always be protected.