By embracing JavaScript for the app logic, Fuse has become not just a UX toolkit, but a full fledged app development platform where people can leverage their skills from the web and other platforms to build full products.

Over the past few years, the Fuse community has grown to over 80.000 developers and designers, from all around the world (180 countries, to be exact), with 5000 forum posts, 3000 members in our Slack community, and tens of thousands more around the web. Needless to say, we’re incredibly proud of this.

Features are nice, but ecosystem is king

Over the last few years, more and more platform providers have adopted many of the ideas that Fuse pioneered, such as designer-friendly declarative code for expressing rich UIs, making changes to the code while it is running, real-time visual tooling, and supporting all major platforms with a single code base. React Native, Xamarin and NativeScript to mention just a few, have all become mature, powerful options.

Development tools have come to be a very hot space where big players like Facebook, Microsoft and Google compete for precious developer mindshare, and all trends are now pointing towards the tools in this space being free and open source.

For any development platform to succeed, it is crucial to attract a critical mass of developers, supporters and an ecosystem of third-party integrations. While we have come a long way, and the Fuse community contains many die-hard fans, we are simply not able to keep up with the ecosystem momentum of the platforms backed by the industry giants.

For many people building mobile products today the lack of such an ecosystem will in the long run outweigh the benefits that Fuse offers in areas like workflow, designer- and beginner-friendliness.

Shifting gears

As an independent development tools company we can no longer bet on a business model where a large enough number of developers and designers — the foundation of our entire industry—opt to pay for the tooling we provide.

However, our original vision to bring great UX to all screens and use cases is still far from realized.

It’s no longer just a question of technology, but a question of business model and solving the problem by offering the right thing to the right stakeholder. For the majority of companies out there, being able to afford and attract the talent to build and maintain high quality mobile products is an unsolved and escalating problem. This is what has enabled our new tech business model to emerge as a natural evolution of a 6-year journey.

This is also a good reason for us to make our platform completely free and open source, while we’re introducing a fresh new vision for where our space, and our company, is going.

What’s in the Open Source box?

The Fuse platform, Uno (the foundation of Fuse), Fuse Studio (the desktop design tool), our former premium code libraries, the documentation and the iOS and Android preview apps are all going Open Source. The source code is hosted on GitHub under the MIT license.

We always intended to make the core of Fuse open source (we started this work almost two years ago, by making our editor API and Fuse libraries open source), but it has simply taken a while longer to complete than we anticipated.

By going Open Source, our hard work will live on, not only to support what has already been created, but to lay the foundation for an unpredictable and exciting future. As we cut the code free from gritty business constraints it still stands a chance of achieving its true potential.

Free — as in beer & speech

Starting today, Fuse Professional with all its premium features will now become available free of charge and Open Source under permissive licenses. It will be renamed to Fuse Open.

We will continue to host the Fuse forums, documentation and Slack community. Docs will become part of the Fuse Open GitHub repo, and the forums and Slack community will transition to being managed by the community directly.

All of our previous premium offerings (such as Fuse Studio and our set of Premium code libraries) are now available through the open source version of Fuse.

We have removed the authentication backend for Fuse Studio to give everyone access to the full set of features without having to register a user account. Simply click the “log in”-button and the rest should work out automatically.

Thank you

Finally, a big thanks to the community who made Fuse what it is today, and for all the cool things you built and will keep building with the platform. The Fuse team will still be around in our community slack and forums for a chat. See you there!

Questions and answers

Q: Can I still buy Fuse Professional, Enterprise, support etc?

A: No, those products are no longer available for new customers. All of the formerly premium features of Fuse are now available in Fuse Open. For support, your option going forward is the community forums and Slack.

Q: So, everything that used to cost money is now free?

A: Pretty much, yes. The Fuse platform, Uno (the foundation of Fuse), Fuse Studio (the desktop design tool), our former premium code libraries, documentation and iOS and Android preview apps are all going Open Source. The source code is hosted on GitHub under the MIT license. We are doing this to better position Fuse as alternative for students and beginner developers so that they can create new mobile app prototypes.

Q: How do I access the previously paid features?

A: Simply click the “log in”-button and the rest should work out automatically. We have removed the authentication backend for Fuse Studio to give everyone access to the full set of features without having to register a user account.

Q: Will the community persist?

A: We recently migrated to a new forum solution that will continue to be available for the foreseeable future, and the Fuse Slack Community will also be continued. We will be putting out an open call for interested parties to take over the community management, including admin of those platforms.

Q: What happens with my fusetools.com user?

A: It will be deleted, along with any subscription you have on any current Fuse mailing or update notification list (after the Fuse 1.9 release, which will be our last official release). As of today, we are ending the old licensing of the Fuse platform and replacing it with a new, Open Source MIT license attached to Fuse Open. We will also be sending out an email to all current newsletter subscribers where we ask if you’d like to opt in to receive emails from us — people who don’t reply will be removed from all of our email lists.

Q: Will this break my existing apps?

A: No, your apps already available on app stores won’t be affected at all. Also, if you need to use older release versions of Fuse those will still be available. As always, if you want to carry on working on an existing project using a different Fuse version, regardless of whether it’s an official release or based on the open sourced code, you should ensure that nothing has changed in some way that might negatively influence the operation of your app.

Q: Will Fuse Open receive any more official updates?

A: We’re currently working on Fuse 1.9 which will be available from the Fuse Open GitHub page very soon. This release will include some cleanup and fixes, as well as disentangle Fuse Open Source from the last remaining connections to Fuse official servers and services. There are currently no official releases planned past Fuse 1.9. Installers for older versions (before open sourcing Fuse), including the latest releases from Fuse Open can be found here.

Q: What about Fusetools, the company?

A: We’re in a strong financial and technological position and through the roughly 5 years of making development tools we have learned a lot about the problems with app development. We are now commercially focusing on the Fuse App Engine and the Apps-as-a-Service business model. You can read more about it on our website.