Apple Acquires Enterprise Device Management Firm Fleetsmith

It's probably go the way of most of Apple's other enterprise/educational services: Apple will only support Apple devices, while Google and Microsoft and other competitor's MDM supports all platforms, so no medium sized company or university will use it because they can't ensure or don't want to have a 100% Apple environment, and they don't want to do everything twice.

As someone who worked for Apple B2B for 5+ years you're 100% right. Apple and business go together like Apple and Intel... they have to somewhat but they sure don't want to support it.

Interesting, this might make Jamf nervous considering they have a lot of schools on their books with purely iOS/macOS devices.

hate it when corporate it gains more control of emplyees computers
how do we get our work done with all the bloat and restrictions and permissions

My IT team uses Fleetsmith, we woke up this morning to find all 3rd party app integrations GONE. The entire 'value proposition' has bottomed-out. Fleetsmith charges up front, annually, we paid $24K+ last January and now the most useful feature set has been ripped out. The terms say they can add and remove features at any time, but imagine if you took your car into a dealership for its warranty service and they returned it without the seats, justifying it on 'terms'. Not what you expect when terms state 'add or remove features'; this was the entire feature set!
This is not any kind of behavior a customer would expect from a partner; and if your vendor is not behaving like a partner...
It is still possible to manually create an app for assignment to a profile so you can push its install to devices. However, this requires constant updating by an IT resource to ensure the most recent versions of an app package is replacing the outdated version. The overhead created by this is HUGE, especially for SMBs with limited IT resources.
Overall, before this 'gutting', the service was fairly immature, lacking some basic admin functions and features. I was truly shocked when I read the announcement that Apple bought them. It will require a lot of heavy lifting (think FileVault encryption keys), but as soon as possible, and hopefully with some claw-back of our subscription fees by our legal department, we will move to an alternative, Addigy or jamfPRO.

This could be interesting, I manage our MDM at my organization and if Apple decides to offer a 1st-party MDM solution it could really be a great benefit to us, especially if it's free and an extension to Apple DEP/Business Manager.

Addition to Apple Business Manager / Apple School Manager?
Getting some security and management features in there in the future?