AvantGo

» see avantgo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A Palm was not something anyone around me owned. In Turkey around 2001 the money a Palm V cost went into a graphics card instead, and the thing people actually carried in a pocket was a Nokia with a monochrome screen. The hardware list i kept in my forum signature on frmtr never had a handheld anywhere in it, because nobody would have been impressed by one.

AvantGo started in 1997 in San Mateo, founded by Felix Lin and Linus Upson, and it solved a problem that is easy to forget existed. A PDA in 1998 had a decent screen and no way at all to reach the network. AvantGo's answer was to move the network hop onto the desktop computer and let the handheld stay dumb.

You went to avantgo.com on a real machine and subscribed to channels. There were hundreds of them, including most of the newspapers and magazines of the period, formatted down to a few hundred pixels wide. A desktop client fetched the current version of everything on your list, and the next time you put the device in its cradle the pages went across. Then you read them somewhere with no signal, which in 1999 was almost everywhere.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The browser was better than it had any need to be. AvantGo shipped a genuinely W3C-compliant renderer onto hardware with a few megabytes of memory, and it handled forms and JavaScript, so a synced page could still take input while the device was completely offline. That is what turned a reading app into a platform. Field sales staff and hospital wards ran forms on it, and the enterprise side quietly became the actual business.

The offline-first design is the part that reads as modern now. Everything you wanted was already on the device, and the network was an occasional event rather than a condition of anything working. Service workers turned up to do roughly this job for the browser about fifteen years later, and the arguments about staleness were the same arguments.

~ the early days ~

AvantGo went public on 28 September 2000, priced at $12 and closing the day at $20, which put a market capitalization of nearly a billion dollars on a company that formatted news for handhelds. Headcount got close to 400. Registered users were reported anywhere between seven and ten million depending on which contemporary account you read, and the company never appears to have settled on a number itself.

That was the top of it. The mobile internet money left the market within months of the listing, and the chief executive went as the stock was delisted. On 12 December 2002 Sybase bought the company for $38 million, which reporting at the time noted was only a little more than the cash AvantGo still had in the bank.

~ what it became ~

Sybase folded it into iAnywhere and kept it running for another six and a half years, mostly for the corporate customers. The consumer channel service drifted. Support for Palm OS and Pocket PC quietly disappeared from the later versions in favor of BlackBerry and Java phones, and by then the whole premise had gone with it, because a phone with a data plan does not need a cradle.

The notice went up in June 2008 and all synchronization and channel services stopped on 30 June 2009. What remained of the company repositioned as an SMS advertising and content delivery business, which is the sort of ending that tells you the product had been over for a while. Linus Upson, the co-founder who had been CTO, later spent years running engineering on Google Chrome, a browser that eventually had to go and solve the offline problem over again.

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