Justin Kahn
Posts: 752 +6
Andrew Vyrros, one of lead developers at Apple behind iMessage, FaceTime and Push Notifications among other things, has left the company. According to reports, Vyrros left Cupertino several months back even though Apple just recently made the move official.
Vyrros has held prominent positions with Yahoo and Xerox PARC in the past, not to mention a role with Steve Jobs' company NeXT. Sources close to the matter say he played an integral role at Apple while for the most part remaining unheard of. He was was also largely responsible for features like iTunes Genius, Back To My Mac and Game Center.
Vyrros will now take on the position of CTO at Layer, a start-up company focused on adding chat and other features to any app via a few simple lines of code. Essentially a communications platform in the making, Layer provides other developers a simple and easy way to integrate chat, video, cloud sync, and notification services into their apps for a small fee, rather than having a custom system built from scratch. Layer also offers devs its UI kit which allows them to customize various features within their apps offering users a unique experience.
The focus here is to offer companies scalability and security among other things and it seems like co-founder Ron Palmeri, which is one of the individuals behind the technology that later became Google Voice, is bringing together the right people to accomplish that.
"Building that crap is hard. If you want security, scalability, low latency, bandwidth and power efficiency (and you do), it becomes brutally difficult. But also interesting and challenging and pretty darn fun. This is where Layer comes in," Vyrros recently wrote in a blog post entitled "Why I Joined Layer." He continued by saying that "we're not just focusing on a single application. We're laying out a whole dang platform, something that can grow a multitude of novel apps. Leveraging the creativity of a flood of inventive and restless developers."
Still currently in private beta, reports suggest the service has already garnered a line-up of waiting developers. The company was valued by investors in the mid $60 million range after a recent round of funding, according to reports.
