Michal Ždanský Apple is losing another key figure, this time engineer Andrew Vyrros, who was behind the birth of iMessage and FaceTime. Although his departure became public only yesterday after Apple announced it, Vyrros has been out of the company for several months. He joined the emerging startup Layer, which wants to create a communication standard for applications where it will provide its own backend.
Vyross has not only been involved in two well-known communication services that allow users to text and call over the Internet on iOS and Mac without much effort. He also has work on push notifications, Game Center, iTunes Genius and Back to My Mac. He spent a total of five years at Apple, but before that he worked at Jobs' NeXT for over two years. In the interim he also worked for Yahoo or Xereox PARC.
He will take the position of CTO (Chief Technology Officer) at Layer and is not the only interesting personality in his field to join the startup. He will work with, for example, Jeremie Miller, the creator of the chat language of the Jabber service (on which Facebook Chat also works), George Patterson, the former head of operations at OpenDN, or Ron Palemri, one of the creators of Grand Central, which became a Google service after the acquisition Voice.
Layer is not meant to be just another proprietary chat service, but a backend that other developers can implement into their apps with just a few lines of code. Layer will also take care of push notifications, cloud synchronization, offline storage and other necessary service for IM operation. Layer will offer this backend to developers for a small recurring fee.
It looks like some "Big One" at Apple can't stand smart colleagues and critics, and they prefer to leave, and iOS 7 looks and works accordingly. By the way, my iPad 2 iOS 7 doesn't have all the Czech language, for example the calendar, on my friend's iPhone it's in Czech, does anyone have it as well, or is it some kind of anomaly with my iDevice?