I can’t believe they got a whole week into 2014 before announcing an acquisition. If only CES had been last week.
Yahoo announced at the show that it has acquired Android smart homescreen app Aviate, saying that it will make the Aviate experience part of its own Android-based experiences.
“The average person has screens and screens of apps on their mobile phones, with only a handful of those being used daily,” says Yahoo SVP Mobile and Emerging Products Adam Cahan. “Yet we spend our time swiping from screen to screen, hunting, loading, seeking information; our homescreen (launcher) experiences are far from smart. Think about the repetitive nature of getting in your car every day and launching the same apps, or arriving home and yet the same screens are there. We know there’s a better user experience.”
“We envision homescreens becoming smarter, more personalized, aware of your context. Aviate helps us bring this vision to life,” he adds. “Aviate auto-categorizes apps on your Android phone and intelligently gathers them into “spaces.” By using signals to understand your context – WIFI, GPS, Accelerometer, Time, etc – Aviate automatically surfaces information at the moment it’s useful. So whether you’re just waking up, driving, at work, or maybe out for the night, Aviate learns your habits and helps anticipate the information and apps you need – making your phone smarter.”
The Aviate team talks about the acquisition in a blog post:
It’s been quite the past few months for Aviate. Since launching the product last fall, we’ve been amazed and encouraged by the incredibly positive response we’ve seen from the Android community. Today, we are absolutely thrilled to announce that Aviate is being acquired by Yahoo. Don’t worry, Aviate isn’t going anywhere.
We founded Aviate with a mission to make our phones smarter and organize themselves around us, instead of vice versa. In short, make our phones simpler. We’re thrilled you love the product and want you to know that we are committed to continued innovation of Aviate. The technology and product will remain the same — it’s simply going to get better, faster.
When we met with Yahoo, it was obvious how aligned our visions are. Yahoo, like us, is all about simplifying and streamlining users’ daily habits through intelligent and beautiful products. We see endless opportunities for how the two of us can work together. We can’t wait to take this next step.
The app has been in private beta, but they’re offering the code YAHOO if you want to get it for free.
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