Nikhil Vaze – Senior Software Engineer on the Electric Cloud Engineering Team

To say that there is an overabundance of managed development platforms on the market would be a tremendous understatement, especially as far as the mobile landscape is concerned, but one firm believes that there’s room for one more. Electric Cloud Inc. on Wednesday unveiled Ship.io , a continuous integration (CI) service built with the specific requirements of iOS and Android apps in mind.

The launch comes hot on the heels of Docker Inc., the most buzzed about name in the cloud, acquiring a competing CI-as-a-service provider called Koality Inc. as part of an effort to monetize its namesake Linux container engine. The two firms share the same goal of improving developer productivity and shortening software release cycles, but while the platform Docker obtained through its latest deal is designed for enterprise engineers with strict security standards to uphold, Ship.io is targeting the mobile crowd.

The service is a rebranded version of the continuous integration service Electric gained as part of a continuous integration purchase of its own, a startup called CiSimple Inc. it quietly picked up a few months ago. The platform promises to automate the configuration of iOS and Android projects and everything that entails, most importantly the once labor-intensive task of optimizing an application for multiple devices with varying screen sizes.

Another advantage Ship.io boasts over more general-purpose alternatives is integration with all the latest development tools and operating systems in the mobile universe, including XCode 6, the freshly launched iOS 8 and the preview version of the forthcoming Android release. Plus, the platform allows users to tap into online code repositories for the Git revision control software directly from the native interface.

That extensive third party support not only enables developers to exploit the new technologies hitting market but also incorporate Ship.io into their existing toolchains. That’s helpful for individual developers and even more so for large teams, which Electric Cloud says can also utilize the service to monitor the most up-to-date builds. And the platform doesn’t stop there, making it possible for users to roll out those builds to users over-the-air or leveraging popular distribution tools like TestFlight and HockeyApp.

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