Announcing the Mobile Native Foundation
Article Summary
Keith Smiley from Lyft just announced something that could change how we all build mobile apps. Instead of every company rebuilding the same infrastructure in silos, major tech players are finally collaborating.
Lyft, alongside 18+ companies including Airbnb, Spotify, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, launched the Mobile Native Foundation under The Linux Foundation. It's a vendor-neutral home for open source mobile tooling and collaboration on the hard problems that platform vendors don't solve—especially for teams scaling from dozens to hundreds of mobile engineers.
Key Takeaways
- Foundation tackles problems Apple and Google don't solve at scale
- Lyft contributing Kronos, index-import, and set-simulator-location as seed projects
- Hosts public discussions and projects for UI frameworks, build systems, networking stacks
- Backed by 19 companies tired of duplicating massive mobile infrastructure investments
The Mobile Native Foundation creates an industry-wide collaboration space to stop rebuilding the same mobile tooling in isolation and start sharing solutions to common scaling challenges.
About This Article
As Lyft's mobile team scaled from a dozen engineers to hundreds, they hit problems that platform vendors simply didn't address.
Keith Smiley and others at Lyft started the Mobile Native Foundation with backing from The Linux Foundation and 19 companies like Airbnb, Spotify, and Microsoft. The goal was to create a home for open source projects and public conversations around shared mobile infrastructure challenges.
Companies now have a vendor-neutral place to collaborate. Instead of each building their own UI frameworks, build systems, and networking stacks, they can contribute seed projects like Kronos, index-import, and set-simulator-location to the foundation.