Peter was Content Manager at Branch from 2017 to 2018. During his tenure, he managed the company’s blog, social media accounts, newsletters, email campaigns, and case studies.
May 01, 2018
Perhaps unbeknownst to you, your journey to this webpage has been a series of hops made possible by dozens of open source applications. Whether it is the encryption used to connect to this website, your browser’s engine, or the server operating this website, open source software is ubiquitous in today’s world. There are two primary reasons why many developers have jumped on the open source wagon:
Conversely, open source projects that don’t have a commercial entity behind them lack warranties and contractual liabilities. The software is distributed as-is—without any guarantees of functionality, SLAs, or liabilities for malfunction. Because this could be a deal-breaker for enterprise companies, numerous vendors sprung up to satisfy this need and provide enterprise-level paid support for open source projects. Branch gives you the best of both worlds—we open source our SDKs, but at the same time professionally maintain them. We also extend the same best-of-class support that we provide for our core and paid products to our SDKs.
When it comes to mobile SDKs geared towards attribution and analytics, the open source model is a strong asset because:
You may have heard claims that open source SDKs affect the weight of the app, or that they can’t be used for enterprise apps. Such judgements are not related to whether the SDKs are open or close sourced, but rather to general software quality and processes. As such, you can know beforehand how much space any 3rd party library (open or closed) would add to your released app.
The same logic applies to claims about scalability and, more specifically, the claim that any modifications to open source code will break existing builds. You can include a specific version of third party libraries, which usually have semantic release versions. This practice ensures predictability and protects your app from any unintended consequences of a new library release. Again, these are widespread software practices that apply to both open and close sourced SDKs.
Users expect your mobile app to consistently function as advertised, and trust that you are taking the necessary precautions to protect their privacy. The bad guys only need to get lucky once—it only takes one security incident to ruin your reputation and erode that hard-earned trust. Therefore, it is important to understand the practices adopted by third-party vendors when integrating their SDKs. Here are the top 3 things to keep in mind when integrating an outside SDK into your mobile app:
At Branch, two of our core values are partners first and transparency. By open-sourcing our SDKs, we’re living up to our values by maintaining transparency with respect to our data. Gone are the days of wondering how open sourced SDKs like Branch behave inside your apps and on your websites.
Click here to learn how Branch can take your mobile growth to the next level.
Peter was Content Manager at Branch from 2017 to 2018. During his tenure, he managed the company’s blog, social media accounts, newsletters, email campaigns, and case studies.
May 01, 2018