CrabNebula: A New Star Forge Emerges

May 2, 2023

Welcome! I’m excited to properly introduce you to CrabNebula, one of the few companies focused on creating Tauri-centric services and tools. We’re dedicated to helping individuals and businesses sustainably build, develop, and distribute their apps to mass audiences.

How It Started: Tauri

In the spring of 2019, Lucas Nogueira and I were hitting roadblocks with app distribution for a project. This spurred a lively discussion with other open-source developers about the shortcomings of existing tools for creating web-based applications, particularly with licensing, security, and performance.

We ended up leveraging system webviews, the Rust programming language, and a super effective updater system to create the open-source project now known as Tauri: a developer toolset that’s front-end agnostic, creates smaller binaries through compilation during the building process, and prioritizes memory efficiency while remaining relatively small.

Thanks to numerous volunteer contributions from the open-source community, Tauri has evolved into the 1.3 version available soon. It can build and ship apps with manageable memory size at scale, which in turn uses less energy consumption on local machines and minimizes attack surface by bundling and shipping only the features that are absolutely necessary.

The Tauri community places a great deal of importance on ensuring the open-source project is owned and guided by the community, for the community. In fact, it is governed by its own non-profit Tauri Programme within the Commons Conservancy (you can learn more at tauri.app).

Since 2019, Tauri has grown its community to hundreds of contributors and over 60k stargazers on GitHub (it’s in the top 150 most-starred projects). Tauri is used in more than 12k public repositories, has multiple stable releases and has been third-party audited for security. Many projects are already using Tauri technologies, including Padloc, Spacedrive, and more.

How It’s Going: CrabNebula

To bolster the Tauri community and reinforce the Working Group developers who donated their time to maintaining the open-source project, CrabNebula was born. We founded the company on the principles of (1) sharing the experience and expertise of those who knew Tauri to its fullest extent and (2) giving back to the community from which it emerged.

CrabNebula was initially composed primarily of core members from the Tauri Working Group. Since then, the team has expanded to over 20 members from various backgrounds and disciplines, collectively working to deliver the promise of Tauri to individuals and businesses by reducing complexity, risk, and the security concerns of both their apps and users.

With the formation of CrabNebula, we are bringing new services and educational opportunities to the Tauri ecosystem, helping to lead research and development programs to drive functionality and accessibility, and contribute back to Tauri to help push it forward as a platform for everyone. We strongly believe in the principles and values of open-source and cooperative success and are excited to do our part in making software development accessible to everyone.

Offerings

We are excited to add to the Tauri ecosystem with two CrabNebula offerings:

Consulting with specific focus on architecture design, Tauri feature development, and auditing for privacy and security vulnerabilities.

Distribution will debut later this year with our Content Distribution Network, allowing developers to roll out both their apps and updates to customers, globally, at top of market speeds. In addition, real-time insights will be available for metrics like number of downloads, general regions of users, and platforms using the apps.

Now, you can use Tauri to build your app and have the support to guide you along the way with architecture consulting, Tauri feature development and security audits. Then use our platform to get your app out faster and safer than ever.

To stay up to date on the latest developments, you can subscribe to future announcements on our website at crabnebula.dev.

Careers

We will have several more roles available and plans to offer internship opportunities. I would like to also clearly and loudly encourage women and other underrepresented people to consider joining our team and helping us on our mission. We are constantly striving to learn from each other. You can find out more on our careers page.


On behalf of the CrabNebula team, I want to share our enthusiasm for creating Tauri-centric services and tools for those who have grown to love the Tauri project. In the coming months, I look forward to sharing more about our planned products and services.

If you have any questions, we’re always here to help — just email us at contact@crabnebula.dev.

Daniel Thompson-Yvetot
Daniel Thompson-Yvetot Chief Executive Officer