We've talked about Supertop's Castro a few times here at iMore. It's a podcast app that has a super sleek design and is a pleasure to use with the gesture-based interface and some powerful features available with a Castro Plus subscription.
Today, Supertop has announced that Tiny has purchased a majority stake in Castro. The developers are still shareholders and will continue to work on the app full time as employees of Tiny. Supertop as a brand itself will now be a lot quieter, they say.
You may not know of Tiny directly, but most of us are familiar with them in some way or another. They own Dribbble and Flow. The guys behind Tiny are Andrew Wilkinson and Chris Sparling. Wilkinson previously founded MetaLab, which helped design Slack from the ground up. Sparling was the CFO over at MetaLab before they both decided to leave to start Tiny.
Both Wilkinson and Sparling have said that they have no interest in micromanaging the day-to-day work of Castro. They'll only be shaping the vision and roadmap but leaving the actual work to Oisín and Pádraig of Supertop.
The reason behind selling Castro is simple. Castro has reached the point where the demands of running a business is pulling those involved in too many different directions, so there's a loss of focus. Now that Castro has been sold to Tiny, Supertop gains more resources, contacts, and expertise.
With this major announcement, Supertop has some more exciting news to share as well. They've started work on Castro 4, and with these new resources, they're able to focus on it entirely from the perspective of designers and developers without distractions. This means we should look forward to seeing a great new product on the horizon.
To get all of the news about this acquisition, make sure to check out their blog post here.
