Betavine

» see betavine.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A mobile network operator decided, in 2007, that it wanted developers to like it. This was not a small thought at the time. The iPhone had just been announced and had no third-party apps yet, the carriers still controlled what went on a handset, and the standing relationship between a developer and an operator was a licensing conversation that usually ended badly. Vodafone's response was Betavine: a public site where anyone could upload an alpha and have strangers tell them what was broken on it.

It was run by Vodafone Group R&D rather than by marketing, which shows in what got built. Device-compatibility tools told you which handsets your thing would actually run on, and a betavine.mobi front end arrived in early 2008 so the catalog could be browsed from a phone instead of a desk. A pilot with Vodafone Spain wired the whole thing into the operator's own mobile portal.

Vodafone had been a Turkish carrier since it bought Telsim in 2006, so the name was on bills in this country the entire time Betavine was running. The developer program was not. That side of the company lived in Newbury, in English, aimed at the European app scene that was forming around Symbian and early Android. The brand reached Turkey years before the R&D arm's idea of a community did, and the community was gone before it got here.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the forge ~

The serious half of Betavine was Betavine Forge, a GForge instance where the open-source work lived. The projects on it were not toys. The Vodafone Mobile Connect Card Driver for Linux lived there, written in Python under the GPL, and it is what made Vodafone's 3G dongles work on a Linux laptop at a time when that was a real fight. The Betavine Connection Manager sat beside it, along with a research project on Linux environments for mobile networks.

Running a public GForge was a specific choice in 2007, and the same software was carrying Debian's own infrastructure at Alioth in those years. An operator hosting GPL drivers for its own hardware, on a forge it paid for, is a more open position than most phone companies have taken before or since.

~ three days in February ~

The end is bracketed to a long weekend. At 09:57:14 GMT on Sunday 19 February 2012, the Betavine home page was still doing its own thing: a redirect into its own single sign-on service, with the session check appended, the way a logged-out visitor would see it. Application listings were still returning real JSON from the portal API that same afternoon. At 17:33:42 GMT on Wednesday 22 February 2012, the identical URL answered 301 to developer.vodafone.com, and every capture after that, for twelve years, is the same 301.

Nobody wrote a shutdown post. The last thing left in the archive from the site's own hand is a theme directory called betavine-rebranded, carrying a Betavine wordmark and a Vodafone wordmark side by side, which is roughly how this ended.

~ what it was for ~

Betavine belongs to a short window where every big operator tried to build a developer story before the app stores took the decision away from them. Vodafone also put its weight behind the Wholesale Applications Community, the operator alliance meant to produce a cross-carrier store, and that went nowhere too. By 2012 the question of where a developer published an app had been settled by two companies that are not phone networks.

Both domains are gone in the ordinary way. betavine.net does not resolve at all now, on either scheme. betavine.com still answers, and what it answers is a HugeDomains sale page, which is the going rate for a five-year experiment in getting developers to trust a phone company.

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