Year: 2020

Sometimes you can’t just get a [L]uckin’ break.

After announcing this morning that it is ending its fight to stay listed on Nasdaq, China-based coffee chain and delivery company Luckin Coffee announced that it is requiring that its chairman, Lu Zhengyao, resign in a filing with the SEC.

It also announced in its SEC filing that the chairman has requested the firing of independent director Sean Shao through a shareholders resolution, which will be voted upon at a shareholders meeting to be held on Sunday, July 5th.

My god.

It’s getting ugly at Luckin, which is struggling to turnaround in the aftermath of revelations of a $300 million accounting fraud that has seen its stock price plummet in recent months. Shao has been leading the board’s independent investigation over the accounting irregularity.

Now, at a shareholders meeting, the board will be up for grabs, with investors in the company (yes, there are still investors!) choosing who to keep and who to fire in a devolving case of corporate governance run amok.

In addition to voting on several current directors of the company, shareholders will also vote on installing two new independent directors, Zeng Ying and Yang Jie, who have long-time business and legal backgrounds.

We had previously known about the extraordinary shareholders meeting, but now the company has upped the ante, by voting to force out the chairman by July 2 — three days before the shareholders meeting is scheduled to take place.

Honestly, at this point, it’s impossible to say what comes next. But what I can say is that Luckin is currently trading down 54% at close this Friday, and is worth barely a few hundred million dollars — down from its peak market cap of over $12 billion. Wh ever wins is going to own some truly empty cups.

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a forthcoming weekly newsletter from the TC crew about startups, money, and markets. You can sign up for it here, and receive it regularly when it formally launches in a few weeks. You can email me about it here, or talk to me on Twitter. Let’s go!

In the last week there were 23 rounds worth $50 million in the world, according to Crunchbase data. The rounds were worth a total of $3.72 billion, with a median value of $80 million and an average size of $161.9 million. So in case you were under the impression that late-stage money was under threat, it’s not.

And it’s not hard to see why; with the public markets flirting with new record highs, late-stage startups are able to raise on the back of strong comps. High public valuations help late-stage startups defend their own prices as much as rising stocks can help direct venture investment to certain sectors at the earlier-stages of startup land.

It’s also a situation that can lead to a rash of IPOs, which we’re on the cusp of seeing. With Agora out this week to good effect, and Lemonade in the wings alongside Accolade, nCino, and GoHealth, things are heating up.

This week The Exchange and TechCrunch more broadly tried to take on the matter, asking questions about Lemonade’s impending public offering, trying our best to explore the S-1 filings of nCino and GoHealth (two IPOs not from California or New York), parsing Accolade’s proposed IPO valuation after it reignited its march to the public markets, and working to grok Agora’s pretty solid IPO pricing.

But there was still more going on. Over on Extra Crunch and TechCrunch this week, we also chewed over Lemonade’s first whack at IPO pricing (down from its prior valuation) and what’s good about it (better than we’d expected), and talked about the host of companies that we are excited about seeing go public over the next few quarters and years.

What’s coming

There are reasons to expect more of the same going forward in terms of IPO density. Looking into Q3 — now just days away — there are some VCs who anticipate a tide of software IPOs as many unicorns try to get public before the election, and while valuations are super hot.

Redpoint’s Jamin Ball is of this view:

You can think of today’s public markets as a do-over for unicorns that should have gone public last year, but put it off. Or in racing terms, it’s a free pit stop for cars that made an error. But if you don’t get out while the getting is this good, what the hell were you waiting for? That’s the multi-billion-dollar question.

Money, markets, mistakes

Let’s catch up on the week’s biggest market news and how we feel about it. As always, we’ll lean toward the private markets but talk about public tech companies when they matter to the startup world.

Social companies took a hit late in the week after Snap, Facebook, and Twitter fell sharply was trading came to a close, after major advertisers like P&G, Unilever, and Verizon* decided that they might actually care what sort of content their ads are shown against. Bear in mind that this sort of ad-dollar yanking is not new; publishers have dealt with this sort of thing for ages. However, social tech companies haven’t taken as many hits from this as they might have over time. Welcome to reality, y’all. For startups? It’s not great for social startups that Facebook and Twitter are taking very public knocks. If they the startups wanted to raise new capital, that is.

SaaS startups — early and late-stage alike — should take heart that the recent spate of public SaaS earnings went pretty ok. There were some misfires, but it could have been worse. And with SaaS shares on the rise again, it’s a lovely time to be a SaaS company. Putting metrics on it, you can find over a dozen public SaaS companies that are worth more than 25x their next year’s sales. That’s insane.

Something we’re tracking is the pace of SaaS investing in 2020. So far, Crunchbase has 648 rounds for companies tagged as SaaS in 2020 through June 26, 2020. Looking at the same interval last year, it was 1,135. Dollars are down from $12.15 billion in the year-ago period, to $9.36 billion this year. Now, there is venture data lag there, but, all the same, it’s not precisely what we expected to see. Perhaps middle-tier SaaS startups are struggling?

The Zoox deal with Amazon shows how far private-market self-driving rounds valued startups ahead of reality. At one point self-driving engineers were the unobtanium of the labor market. Now, we wonder. Still, a $1 billion deal isn’t the end of the world for any company. For self-driving startups, it could mark the end of the good times in the sector, if we hadn’t already crossed the zenith and began a trudge towards its nadir.

Cybersecurity is still hot hot hot, as this week Salesforce poured capital into security startup Tanium. Tanium is now worth $9 billion. 2019 IPO CrowdStrike has been outperforming as a public company, making its sector look rosy at the same time. Some of that beneficence could be at play here.

Fintech is hard. Uber is backing out of its fintech push, it appears. Sure, every company is going to be a fintech company of sorts in time, but not, apparently, like this. Chime et al, rest easy, Uber’s downshift from its formerly frenetic fintech fight indicates that not every major company is going to be able to take a slice of this particular consumer pie.

And, finally, the excellent Kate Clark has notes on startup valuation trends: “The median valuation for Series C or later-stage financings increased to a new high of $120 million in the first half of this year, from $80 million for 2019, according to data provided to The Information by research firm PitchBook.” It’s still good times, we suppose.

There’s so much more to talk about in the worlds of startups, money and markets, but we have to stop here. This newsletter will come out every Friday once we get all the pipes linked up. So, go ahead and subscribe here (it’s 100% free) so that you miss precisely zero entries. Chat soon!

*Verizon owns Verizon Media Group, which owns TechCrunch, which, in turns, owns me.

Shares of Agora, a China and U.S.-based “real-time engagement” API company, soared today after it went public.

Yesterday Agora priced 17.5 million shares at $20 apiece, up from its target range of $16 to $18 per share. The firm raised $350 in its debut, or around 10 times its Q1 2020 revenue and is now amply capitalized and has runway for effectively forever, given its modest cash consumption as an ongoing concern.

But while the debut was a success, seeing Agora’s share price rise as quickly as it did was not universally popular. Regular critic of the traditional IPO process Bill Gurley — a venture capitalist, so someone with a stake in this particular gambit — weighed in:

Let me translate. Gurley is irked — rightly, to at least some degree — that as Agora opened at $45 per share, the company’s IPO was awfully priced. By that we mean that the company should have sold its IPO shares not at $20, but at $45, the value at which the market quickly repriced them.

As $45 is more than twice $20, its bankers “missed by more than [their] original guess.” Given the number of shares the company sold, the mis-pricing could be worth up to $437.5 million!

There’s merit to this argument, but it’s not as complete a slam dunk as it might appear. Chat with CEOs of public companies and they will tell you about how important it is to have steady, stable, long-term shareholders of their equity. Those you might, say, meet on a roadshow and get to invest in your IPO shares.

Those groups — the long-term investors that tech folks claim to love so dearly — are likely a bit more price conscious than the momentum traders eager to find upside in recent debuts. That is, folks more likely to hold onto shares for a shorter period of time.

So, if you want long-term shareholders, you may have to price you IPO under the price the market may initially bear once trading begins.

 

Still, holy shit $20 per share is not close to $45. Gurley has a point.

The future

Change may be coming. The Agora news rotates back to what the NYSE, an American exchange, is doing. Namely trying to come up with a way to let companies direct list (to just start trading, sans pricing or raising new capital), and raise capital. This gets rid of the issues that Gurley highlighted above. At least in theory.

Obviously, if that model becomes possible and long-term investors are willing to pay for shares in a slightly different manner, the new method will be far superior than the old for companies that are great. What sort of companies get burned from first-day pops the most? I reckon it’s the most attractive, or hyped companies.

The companies that would make the most attractive IPOs would use the new method, leaving — what? The detritus to go out the old-fashioned way? Signaling issues abound!

Anyway, it was a zany first day for Agora.

Telemedicine is becoming more widely embraced by the day — and not just for humans. With a pet in roughly 65% of U.S. homes, there is now a dizzying number of companies enabling vets to meet with their furry patients remotely, including Petriage, Anipanion, TeleVet, Linkyvet, TeleTails, VetNOW, PawSquad, Vetoclock, and Petpro Connect.

One of these — a two-year-old, 13-person, L.A.-based startup called Airvet — unsurprisingly thinks it is the best among the bunch, and it has persuaded investors of as much. Today, the company is announcing $14 million in Series A funding led by Canvas Ventures, with participation by e.ventures, Burst Capital, Starting Line, TrueSight Ventures, Hawke Ventures, and Bracket Capital, as well as individual investors.

The pandemic played a role in Canvas’s decision, as did a smart model, suggests general partner Rebecca Lynn, who says she has looked at many telemedicine startups over the last 11 years and that she fell for Airvet after using the service for the animals that live on her own small farm. While vets were initially slow to embrace the shift to more telehealth visits, Airvet has “solved” some of the “objections unique to the space,” she says. Plus, “COVID has been a massive accelerant to adoption.”

We asked Airvet’s founder and CEO, Brandon Werber, to make the company’s case to us separately.

TC: Why start the company?

BW: My dad is one of the most well-known vets in the U.S. – celebrity vet Dr. Jeff Werber. We saw the impact that telehealth was making in the human world and wanted to bring the same access to and level of care we get for ourselves to our pets.Since I grew up in the pet space, I know it intimately and recognized a lot of inefficiencies in the delivery of care and how vets have been unable to meet the evolving expectations of pet owners.

TC: How are you connecting vets with their pet patients?

BW: We have two apps. One is for pet-owners to download to talk with a vet, and one is for vets to download to organize workflows and talk to their clients. We do not usurp any existing vet relationships. Instead, we partner with vet clinics and enable them to conduct telehealth visits and simultaneously enable pet-owners to have access to vets 24/7, even if they don’t live nearby a vet hospital.

A huge portion of pet owners in the US don’t even have a primary vet. For serious health issues like surgery, animals still need to go in-person, and network vets can even refer them. We’ve also seen Airvet used as curbside check-in, where pet-owners can chat and follow their pet’s in-person vet appointment via live video from the parking lot.

TC: I see there is a minimum charge of $30 per visit. How do you make this model work financially for vets?

BW: Vets view us as an additional revenue-generating tool on top of their base income. We don’t hire vets. Our network of 2,600+ vets are largely the same vets who use Airvet within their own hospital. They can decide at will, like an Uber drive, to swipe online to be part of the on-demand network and take calls from pet parents anywhere in the country to generate additional income.

TC: What have you learned from startups to try this model before?

BW: All the startups that came before us are not consumer-first and are just focused on building tools for vets, so their platforms cannot be used by every pet owner. Instead, they can only be used by pet owners whose own vets use that specific platform, which is a tiny fraction of vets and therefore a tiny fraction of pet parents.

TC: Do you have ancillary businesses? Beyond these vet visits, are you selling anything else?

BW: For now, just the vet visits, which range from a $30 minimum to higher, based on the vet and specialty. Over time, we have plans and partnerships lined up to expand into other pet health verticals.

A projected $99 billion will be spent on pets in the U.S. alone in 2020, and for us, telemedicine is only the beginning.

TC: Does Airvet involve specific practice management software?

BW: No. We provide the workflow layer enabling vets to schedule virtual appointments, which will soon be able to be fully integrated with their existing systems and workflows.

TC: When a customer calls a vet for $30, is there a time limit?

BW: There is no time limit and cases will usually stay open for three full days, so pet parents can continue to access the vet via chat for any follow up questions or concerns.

TC: Are you competing at all on pricing?

BW: Our goal is to work alongside the hospitals, not to compete with them or replace them. You can’t take blood virtually or feel a tumor or do a dental. People always will need to go to the vet.

What we want to do is help [pet owners] understand when [to come in]. The average pet parent only goes to the vet 1.5 times a year. A huge segment of users on Airvet have already connected with a vet six times more than that and save time and stress in doing so.

It’s not about competing for us, it’s about being the provider of care in between office visits [and helping] pet parents who have used our service ultimately avoid an unnecessary emergency visit.

With the game industry booming, more entrepreneurs are evaluating where to base their new startup or open a new office for their existing company. The U.S. government’s block on H1-B and L-1 visas will encourage American game startups to add an office abroad much sooner than they otherwise would have. But where?

This spring, I surveyed a number of gaming-focused VCs about which cities are the best hubs for game studios targeting the Western games market. Several locales stood out as heavily recommended — which I’ve shared below — but the most interesting takeaway was the lack of consensus.

Game studios are far less geographically concentrated than other categories of VC-backed startups. While there are odes on Twitter and conference stages that “you can build a successful startup anywhere,” most investors will push founders to locate themselves in the SF Bay Area, or at least in LA, NYC or London. Meanwhile, the most common piece of advice from those I spoke to: You should probably not base a gaming startup in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Access to the right talent is the top priority, as is the ability to retain them. Proximity to investors matters, but a successful game quickly turns a profit, which reduces the need for outside funding beyond Series A (and U.S. and European VCs who focus on gaming tend to be very international in scope). Quality of life, ease of obtaining visas and access to strategic partners all play into the decision as well and will weigh these recommendations differently depending on who you are and the games you’re developing.

Three notes:

• I focused on qualitative research, gauging the assessments of top investors who track new startups in the sector about where the action is right now. 
• The scope of this survey is limited to studios targeting the Western gaming market, so leading hubs in Asia weren’t included.
• I group cities by metropolitan area so, for example, San Francisco includes Redwood City and Seattle includes Bellevue.

North America

In North America, Los Angeles is the clear favorite with Montreal, Seattle, San Francisco, Toronto and Vancouver all receiving many endorsements as the other top hubs. Regarding cities with the most interesting gaming startups recently, Ryann Lai of Makers Fund said, “It is hard to name a single best location, but Toronto, Culver City (in Los Angeles), Orange County (next to Los Angeles) have gotten increasingly popular among gaming founders lately.”

Nearly 40 million Americans are unemployed, and a recent study that examined more than 66,000 tech job layoffs found that sales and customer success roles are most vulnerable amid COVID-19. In response, some quarters of Silicon Valley are abuzz about a long-standing technology: reskilling, or training individuals to adopt an entirely new skillset or career for employment.

As millions look for a way to reenter the workforce, the question arises: Who really benefits from reskilling technology?

That depends on how you look at it, said Jomayra Herrera, a senior associate at Cowboy Ventures. Reskilling for a well-networked manager looks a lot different than it does for someone who doesn’t have as much leverage, and the vast majority of people fall into the latter. Not everyone has a friend at Google or Twitter to help them skip the online application and get right to the decision-makers.

Beyond the accessibility offered by live online classes, she pointed to the difference between assets and opportunities.

“You can give someone access to something, but it’s not true access unless they have the tools and structure to really engage with it,” Herrera said. In other words, how useful is content around reskilling if the company doesn’t support job placement post-training.

Herrera said companies must give individuals opportunities to test skills with real work and navigate the career path. Her mother, who did not go to college and speaks English as a second language, is looking to pursue training online. Before she can proceed, however, she has to surmount hurdles like language support, resume creation, job search and other challenges.

All of a sudden, content feels like a commodity, regardless of if it has active and social learning components. It’s part of the reason that MOOCs (massive open online courses) feel so stale.

Udacity, for example, was almost out of cash in 2018 and laid off more than half of its team in the past two years, according to The New York Times. Now, like other edtech companies, it is facing surges in usage.

In a blog post this Friday afternoon, Y Combinator’s president Geoff Ralston said that the accelerator would make two changes to its terms for startups.

The first would see the size of the standard deal for YC startups decline from $150,000 for 7% (roughly a $2.1 million post-money valuation) to $125,000 for the same equity (or roughly a $1.79 million post-money valuation). The deal will continued to be offered using a SAFE, which YC and a group of others pioneered as a simpler investment option compared to convertible notes.

Interestingly, the firm is always writing into its terms that it will only take pro rata up to 4% of a subsequent round’s size, which is obviously smaller than the 7% ownership that the company is buying in its financing. That 4% number is a ceiling — in cases where the accelerator has less ownership than 4%, the smaller percentage applies. Full terms of Y Combinator’s deal are available on its website.

The new deal will apply to startups who join Y Combinator in the Winter 2021 batch, and doesn’t include startups in the current summer batch (who have already presumably been funded)

YC’s deal has varied over the years. When it first launched more than a decade ago, it offered terms of $20,000 for 6%.

A Y Combinator spokeswoman said that the change was in line with the fundraising and budget realties of the accelerator going forward. “The future of the economy is unpredictable, and we feel it is prudent during these times to switch to a leaner model,” she said. “In our case, we want to be set up to fund as many great founders as possible — especially during a time that is creating an unprecedented change to consumer and business behavior; with these changes comes endless opportunities for startups. And with the changes made to our standard deal, we can fund as many as 3000 more companies.”

Outside of budget, at least a couple of factors are potentially at work here. One is the increased use of Work From Anywhere, which presumably can help lower some of the running costs of a startup, particularly in its earliest days (i.e. no need to pay for that WeWork flex desk).

Y Combinator has also invested more of its funds into emerging markets startups, which can have dramatically lower costs of development given prevailing wages for talent in local markets.

Yet, the cutback is also a sign that the flood of capital entering the Valley in recent years has receded — if ever so slightly — in the wake of COVID-19. Valuations are depressing, and while $25,000 is not a massive loss considering the scale of later venture financings, the 16% valuation haircut is inline with other numbers we have seen in the Valley in recent weeks.

As advertisers pull away from Facebook to protest the social networking giant’s hands-off approach to misinformation and hate speech, the company is instituting a number of stronger policies to woo them back.

In a livestreamed segment of the company’s weekly all-hands meeting, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recapped some of the steps Facebook is already taking, and announced new measures to fight voter suppression and misinformation — although they amount to things that other social media platforms like Twitter have already enacted and enforced in more aggressive ways.

At the heart of the policy changes is an admission that the company will continue to allow politicians and public figures to disseminate hate speech that does, in fact, violate the Facebook’s own guidelines — butit will add a label to denote they’re remaining on the platform because of their “newsworthy” nature.

It’s a watered down version of the more muscular stance that Twitter has taken to limit the ability of its network to amplify hate speech or statements that incite violence.

Zuckerberg said:

A handful of times a year, we leave up content that would otherwise violate our policies if the public interest value outweighs the risk of harm. Often, seeing speech from politicians is in the public interest, and in the same way that news outlets will report what a politician says, we think people should generally be able to see it for themselves on our platforms.

We will soon start labeling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy, so people can know when this is the case. We’ll allow people to share this content to condemn it, just like we do with other problematic content, because this is an important part of how we discuss what’s acceptable in our society — but we’ll add a prompt to tell people that the content they’re sharing may violate our policies.

The problems with this approach are legion. Ultimately, it’s another example of Facebook’s insistence that with hate speech and other types of rhetoric and propaganda, the onus of responsibility is on the user.

Zuckerberg did emphasize that threats of violence or voter suppression are not allowed to be distributed on the platform whether or not they’re deemed newsworthy, adding that “there are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies I’m announcing here today.”

But it remains to be seen how Facebook will define the nature of those threats — and balance that against the “newsworthiness” of the statement.

The steps around election year violence supplement other efforts that the company has taken to combat the spread of misinformation around voting rights on the platform.

 

The new measures that Zuckerberg announced also include partnerships with local election authorities to determine the accuracy of information and what is potentially dangerous. Zuckerberg also said that Facebook would ban posts that make false claims (like saying ICE agents will be checking immigration papers at polling places) or threats of voter interference (like “My friends and I will be doing our own monitoring of the polls”).

Facebook is also going to take additional steps to restrict hate speech in advertising.

“Specifically, we’re expanding our ads policy to prohibit claims that people from a specific race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, gender identity or immigration status are a threat to the physical safety, health or survival of others,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re also expanding our policies to better protect immigrants, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from ads suggesting these groups are inferior or expressing contempt, dismissal or disgust directed at them.”

Zuckerberg’s remarks came days of advertisers— most recently Unilever and Verizon — announced that they’re going to pull their money from Facebook as part the #StopHateforProfit campaign organized by civil rights groups.

These some small, good steps from the head of a social network that has been recalcitrant in the face of criticism from all corners (except, until now. from the advertisers that matter most to Facebook). But they don’t do anything at about the teeming mass of misinformation that exists in the private channels that simmer below the surface of Facebook’s public facing messages, memes and commentary.

It’s now o’clock, founders. A mere 12 hours stands between you and a chance to compete in Startup Battlefield and launch your pre-Series A startup during Disrupt 2020 — in front of the world’s influential technorati.

You won’t find a bigger launching pad, and this window of extraordinary opportunity slams shut on June 26 at 11:59 pm (PT). Apply to Startup Battlefield right here, right now.

This year’s legendary pitch competition is virtual, but the benefits and opportunity that comes from competing are very real and often life changing — for all participants not just the ultimate winner. Let’s explore that a bit more.

The top prize — $100,000 equity free cash — will do wonders for your bottom line. The TechCrunch feature article – brings you into the league of legends. The Disrupt cup and the acclaim that comes with winning, well, who doesn’t love bragging rights? But it’s the huge exposure — on a global scale — to media, investors, potential customers and big tech players looking to acquire promising startups, that can take Battlefield competitors on a whole new trajectory.

Here’s a quick look at how Startup Battlefield works. We accept applications from founders of any background, geography and industry as long as your company is early stage, has an MVP with a tech component (software, hardware or platform) and hasn’t received much major media coverage.

Our editors screen every application and will choose only startups they feel possess that certain je ne sais quoi. The epic pitch-off takes place during Disrupt 2020, which runs from Sept. 14 – 18. Note: This opportunity is 100 percent free. TechCrunch does not charge any application or participation fees or take any equity.

You’ll receive six weeks of free pitch coaching from TC editors to whip you into prime fighting trim. Plus a virtual webinar series with industry experts. You’ll have just 6 minutes to pitch and demo to the judges — a panel of expert VCs, entrepreneurs and TechCrunch editors. Then you’ll answer their questions — and they’ll have plenty.

Founders who survive the first round move to the finals on the last day of Disrupt. It’s lather-rinse-repeat as you pitch to a fresh set of judges. Then it’s time for the big reveal: one startup takes the title, the Disrupt cup and the $100,000.

Have you clicked the application link yet? No? Here are more reasons to apply. If you earn a spot in the competition, you get a Disrupt Digital Pro pass and you get to exhibit to people around the world in Digital Startup Alley — for free.

You’ll network with CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform, to set up virtual 1:1 meetings with investors, media, potential customers and the throngs of folks eager to meet a Battlefield competitor.

Need more perks? We got you covered.

• A launch article featuring your startup on TechCrunch.com
• Access to Leading Voices Webinars: Hear top industry minds share their strategies for adapting and thriving during and after the pandemic
• A YouTube video promoted on TechCrunch.com
• Free subscription to Extra Crunch
• Free passes to future TechCrunch events

This no-cost, perk-packed opportunity disappears in just 12 hours. Do whatever it takes to keep your startup moving forward. Apply to compete in Startup Battlefield before the deadline expires on June 26 at 11:59 pm (PT).

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

When Apple confirmed it had acquired Fleetsmith, a mobile device management vendor, on Wednesday, it seemed like a straightforward purchase, but Fleetsmith customers quickly learned a key piece of functionality had stopped working  — and many weren’t happy about it.

Apple systems administrators began complaining on social media on the morning of the acquisition announcement that the company was no longer allowing them to connect to third-party applications.

“Primarily Fleetsmith maintained a third party app catalog, so you could deploy things like Chrome or Zoom to your Macs, and Fleetsmith would maintain security updates for those apps. This was the main reason we purchased Fleetsmith,” a Fleetsmith customer told TechCrunch.

The customer added that the company described this functionality as a major feature in a company blog post:

Fleetsmith handles this all for you automatically. Once the version is enforced, it is downloaded and queued for install immediately across the device fleet. Most apps will update silently and automatically once they’re restarted, but users can also choose to do the update manually. Our agent will remind users about the update periodically, and then once the enforcement date hits, it will give them an opportunity to save work and then run the update itself.

As it turned out, Apple had made it clear that it was discontinuing this feature in an email to Fleetsmith customers on the day of the transition. The email included links to several help articles that were supposed to assist admins with the transition. (The email is included in full at the end of the article).

The general consensus among admins that I spoke to was that these articles were not terribly helpful. While they described a way to fix the issues, they said that Apple has turned what was a highly automated experience into a highly manual one, effectively eliminating the speed and ease of use advantage of having then update feature in the first place.

Apple did confirm that it had responded to some help ticket requests after the changes this week, saying that it would soon restore some configurations for Catalog apps, and were working with impacted customers as needed. The company did not make clear, however, why they removed this functionality in the first place.

Fleetsmith offered a couple of key features that appealed to Mac system administrators. For starters, it let them set up new Macs automatically out of the box. This allows them to ship a new Mac or other Apple device, and as soon as the employee powers it up and connects to WiFi, it connects to Fleetsmith where systems administrators can track usage and updates. In addition, it allowed System Administrators to enforce Apple security and OS updates on company devices.

What’s more, it could also do the same thing with third-party applications like Google Chrome, Zoom or many others. When these companies pushed a new update, system administrators could make sure all users had the most recent version running on their machines. This is the key functionality that was removed this week.

It’s not clear why Apple chose to strip out these features outlined in the email to customers, but it seems likely that most of this functionality  isn’t coming back, other than restoring some configurations for Catalog apps.

Email that went out to Fleetsmith customers the day of the acquisition outlining the changes:

 

Attempts to reach Fleetsmith founders for comment were unsuccessful. Should that change we will update the article.