Little Eye Labs

» see littleeye.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Android in 2012 was a platform where you could ship an app and have no honest idea what it did to the phone it ran on. Battery complaints came back as one-star reviews with no detail. Memory problems showed up as crashes on devices you did not own. Google's own tooling measured the system, not your app's share of it, and the gap between those two numbers is where a lot of Indian and Chinese handset users lived.

Little Eye Labs was founded in May 2012 in Bangalore to close that gap. Kumar Rangarajan, Satyam Kandula, Lakshman Kakkirala and Giridhar Murthy built a desktop profiler that attached to a real device over USB and broke out CPU, memory, power and network traffic per app, with a timeline you could scrub. You ran your app, you watched the power curve spike, you found the wakelock you had left open. It did one job and it did it for the one platform that needed it most.

Investors included VenturEast and the GSF accelerator. You can still read the customer list off the archived homepage, because it was a logo wall: Intel, Qualcomm, Citrix, GE Healthcare, Capgemini, Fiberlink, Nimbuzz. That is a serious book of business for a company that was less than eighteen months old when Facebook came for it.

~ the record ~

~ the deal ~

Facebook confirmed the acquisition on 7 January 2014 at a reported ten to fifteen million dollars. It was Facebook's first acquisition of an Indian company, which got it a great deal of press in India and almost none anywhere else. The whole team, seven people by then, relocated to Menlo Park to work on mobile analysis tooling inside Facebook.

The product terms were stated up front and honored exactly. New customers stopped being accepted at the announcement. Existing customers were given a free version of the tool and a date: 30 June 2014. Then it was over. Nobody pretended there would be a Little Eye 2.0, and nobody claimed the technology was being folded into something you could buy.

~ what it was worth to someone outside india ~

This is a tool for people who ship Android apps professionally, which in 2014 was a smaller and more specific population than it sounds, and a Bangalore startup's enterprise profiler was never going to show up in Turkish developer conversation. What makes it worth a grave anyway is the shape of the loss. For about eighteen months there was exactly one good answer to "why is my app eating the battery", and that answer was a paid desktop app from four people in Bangalore. Facebook bought the people. The answer went away and Android developers went back to guessing for a few more years until Google shipped Battery Historian and the Android Studio profilers.

An acqui-hire is usually described as a soft landing. From the outside it is a tool being removed from the market by the only party rich enough to not need to sell it.

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