by
Jack Madden
On Tuesday, software company SPARC Ventures announced Knappsack (press release), an open-source mobile application management product. With the mention of MAM and open source, I wanted to check it out, so yesterday I caught up with their team.
This year we've been talking a lot about app wrapping, SDKs, and other techniques for managing apps after they've been distributed, but of course there's another part of the MAM equation: distributing the apps in the first place. Call it an app store, a catalogue, or whatever you want—controlling access to an app itself is the first step in MAM. For right now, distribution and access control is the core of what Knappsack does.
Knappsack was born out of SPARC's own internal need to manage apps throughout the development process, so it has quite a different focus from most of the MAM products that come out of the enterprise mobility management field (though they clearly have the MDM/MAM/BYOD space in mind for the future). There are provisions to keep track of multiple versions of apps and different user groups to support agile development, which is naturally the internal philosophy that was used to develop Knappsack in the first place.
Knappsack is an open-source project, distributed on GitHub and available for other organizations to freely use and adapt as they see fit; SPARC also offers Knappsack as a service.
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