RelativeWave bet designers would pay for app prototyping; Google bought it, Form free

RelativeWave made Form, an $80 'interaction design and prototyping' Mac app that lets designers and developers build visually functional prototypes of apps without writing code. Form was not an app maker — nothing shippable came out of it. Instead it produced a rough prototype that told a team whether a design, including details like how an animation flowed, was heading in the right direction. Form was actually two apps: an OS X visual editor and an iOS app, with changes in the editor mirrored instantly in the pseudo-app on the device without recompiling.

Form launched at $150 and was cut to $80 in September 2014, pricing itself as professional software in the middle of the spectrum between sketching on a napkin and coding the real app. On 2014-11-19 TechCrunch reported that Google had acquired RelativeWave. Terms were undisclosed, but the company said the team would continue working on Form at Google — TechCrunch judged it was not a classic hire-the-team-and-kill-the-product deal, and noted Form was iOS-only, speculating an Android version might follow.

With the acquisition, Form went free on the Mac App Store, and in a move the article called irregular but appreciated, RelativeWave said it would refund those who had previously purchased the app. For a small paid Mac tool, the outcome was an exit to Google with the product kept alive rather than shelved.