[DISCUSSION] Future of BTT?

Hey @Andreas_Hegenberg, I hope you don't mind me asking, but I'm curious about BTT's development structure. Are there plans in place to ensure the project's long-term sustainability and continued development? I mean, what will happen if for example you decide to stop working on it, are there other people to step in?

I have been working on BTT for the last 15 years and don't plan to stop.
If I ever stop working on it I'll probably open source it again.

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That speaks for you, Andreas, but I'm afraid that would hardly help.

There are a few apps for the mac that are developed by just one “ingenious” person and are constantly being developed further. BTT is one of these apps. If this person stops, the magic is gone because this person cannot be replaced. So we can only hope that Andreas will stay with us for as long as possible.

That's truly great! Do you think if you open source it, someone will be able to really step in as a "proper" replacement, after all 15 years is long time, and only you have all the answers why somethings are working as they are and maybe even for you sometimes is hard to remember/reverse engineer why you wrote a particular piece of code. Also have you considered the "bus factor"? I know that most probably this is not "your problem", I'm just ... curious and thinking out loud.

I'll respect and understand if you do not want to discuss this further.

Really appreciate all the work you are putting into this tool and into the community!

Yes, unfortunately it would be very hard (or maybe impossible) for somebody to fully step in. It's 15 years of code (hundreds of thousands of lines of code) that are not easy to understand. A lot of objective-c which modern devs don't really use anymore. I believe people would be able to keep it running without my involvement but probably wouldn't be able to add truly new features.

However this is currently changing a lot with AI. I'm already using a lot of AI tools for coding and they are getting better and better at understanding the code. So maybe in a few years it will actually be easy to continue AI assisted development for somebody else.

My family has emergency access to the code and would know what to do in case of bus :slight_smile: However of course I wouldn't have time to prepare much of a handover in that case :wink:

As BTT is my main source of income and I don't have any motivation to work any other job, I will definitely continue development for as long as possible. I think it is much more likely Apple will kill macOS or prevent apps like BTT from running before I'll stop working on it :wink:

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Thank you for this open conversation Andreas. It's nice that you have thought about the bus with this emergency access, I hope to never need to use it.