Niantic today announced that it acquired developer experience leader Hoss and that the Hoss team will help augment the Lightship ARDK platform.
Hoss is a developer experience platform that offers solutions like customizable dashboards, documentation, and support — all of which it could provide to Lightship. The Ingress and Pokémon Go developer has this year expanded access to the Lightship Augmented Reality Developer Kit (ARDK), though Niantic Lightship itself is still currently in beta. The team at Hoss will join the DX team at Niantic, where it will expand the Lightship platform portal ahead of its use by future developers.
Kei Kawai, the chief product officer at Niantic, said in a statement the acquisition of Hoss will improve the experience for developers: “As we are preparing to open the Lightship platform to developers around the world, it’s critically important that we get two things right — both the tools in the ARDK to help developers build new experiences, and the developer experience as we work together to build this exciting new world of AR experiences.”
Matt Hawkins, Hoss CEO, said in a statement of the acquisition: “The opportunity to join Niantic at this time is incredible. We repeatedly found that developers are not happy with the status quo when it comes to developer experiences, and the chance to build out the Lightship DX as we’re getting ready to open the platform to developers around the world is a once-in-a-career type of opportunity that we are so incredibly excited to be a part of.”