Xtreme Labs builds mobile apps. Our portfolio includes the Facebook, Twitter, and MTV apps, to name a few. We are essentially a contractor, and work on all mobile platforms - Android, iOS, WP8, BB, and Web are the main ones I think.
Source: I work for XL (now part of Pivotal and Pivotal Labs).
Ok, I'm now very confused. When I saw the title I thought "Pivotal Labs" for a second and then "oh no, the 'other' Pivotal that is not Pivotal Labs and which I have no idea what they're doing". I got confused and the past and realized (or thought at least) they were two different entities.
But now, you, as well as an investor quoted in the OP[0], say "Pivotal Labs". Are these two the same thing? Are these two different but related entities? A cursory look at each sites don't seem to mark them linked, though it does show that the OP is about Pivotal as in http://www.gopivotal.com/
Thanks for the clarification!
[0] Actually he's quoted like so: "Palihapitiya even noted that Xtreme had built a “Pivotal Labs for mobile.”", which in itself doesn't mean the buyer is Pivotal Labs, but, in the context, is confusing. It almost sounds like the post's author get the two confused as well. (unless, they're the same thing obviously)
To hopefully clarify a little, Pivotal is the "joint venture" of EMC and VMware to which the article refers. Big data in the cloud is the idea behind the business.
Pivotal Labs was purchased by EMC, though, and is thus a part of Pivotal. I can't say for sure, but I'm betting that's where the name comes from.
Same thing, nit picking and even they refer to themselves as Pivotal.
"Mee oversaw Pivotal Labs’ acquisition by EMC Corporation in March 2012, and continues to lead and guide the vision for Pivotal Labs as vice president of the Cloud Application Platform Group at Pivotal."
It's not the same thing. Labs is part of the greater Pivotal umbrella which includes SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and others.
There is no Cloud Application Platform Group at Pivotal Labs. This is also part of the greater Pivotal umbrella. Rob oversees that group and Pivotal Labs, which he founded.
I'll admit that we do sometimes colloquially refer to Labs as just "Pivotal," but that's not what the name Pivotal is referring to in what you're quoting. It's referring specifically to the company named Pivotal (http://gopivotal.com/)
To my knowledge, Pivotal has a small mobile division called Pivotal Labs. That is the division that Xtreme Labs is most relevant to, as XL is a mobile company. This will increase Pivotal's presence in the mobile scene, which was nowhere near the size of Xtreme Labs.
Like all contractors, either the contractor makes the design and follows up with the client, or the client makes the designs for the contractor to follow. If you have any issues or complaints, please direct them to the appropriate party. There's a 50/50 chance you'll get it right (I don't know who which path was taken :p).
Oh, that is a long, long list, but I'll give a few things:
Facebook:
UI doesn't fit with Android standards, and on top of that it sucks too. An example of how to get it right on Android is the Google+ app. They should really be using the standard action bar (or at least a better emulation of it), and the standard navigation drawer. Facebook had an update for the iOS7 visual standards on release, but they still haven't fully embraced the Holo themes introduced 2 years ago on Android. In fact, the Android app's UI is essentially just bad port of how their old iOS6 app looked.
Poor performance overall, this has gotten better as they've switched to a more native UI, but it's still worse than it should be. Scrolling performance is still a bit janky, even on the Nexus 4 - A few seconds with overdraw shown gives plenty of things to fix.
The Image upload UI is pretty bad, especially that horrifically designed notification.
Twitter has similar issues, mostly to do with using non-standard + bad UI. They have a beta version now with a faked Navigation Drawer, but they got lots of things wrong so feels really out of place (why they didn't use the standard one is a mystery).
Overall, the FB + Twitter Android apps clearly get a lot less love than their iOS apps. They have actually been getting better - the facebook app a few years ago was far worse (e.g. couldn't see or add event comments, which is pretty obviously important on mobile), but they still have a long way to go before they match up to the quality of the Google apps on Android (some of which I have problems with also, but that's a different issue!)
