This is a very exciting day for us (after a very intense few months). We've known the Nordic team for years and could not think of a better partner to grow our platform.
Happy to answer questions, if you have them.
The idea of Memfault is like Datadog for IoT stuff. The reality of Memfault is that everyone just uses it to push OTA firmware upgrades through the cloud, and capture stack traces on crashes. Sometimes you bolt on their metrics later, but 95% of the value is in OTA firmware upgrades and crash reports.
Nordic has started to assemble a juggernaut of a tech stack, and a collossal moat. They keep most of their Zephyr contributions outside the main source tree, in something they call the nRF Connect SDK. They've been developing vendor-specific extensions to Memfault's SDK for years.
The upside with Nordic is you get a complete embedded tech stack out of the box. The downside is that, if their stack doesn't doesn't offer what you need, you have to grapple with the incomprehensibly complex SDK in the entire industry. For some companies, it works great. For others, it's an attractive nuisance.
I don't know how much actually changes for either company with this acquisition. It probably isn't good news if you're ST, Infineon, or Microchip.
I'm assuming Nordic gives the company the support and reach their mission and discover a more workable business model.
This doesn't feel right to me. Back in the day when I started in embedded systems you would have to get it right before you shipped it. That had it's own problems of course, but at least you knew where you stood and if something worked well it would continue to work well until the hardware died.
Also I think the right word grammatically is continual not continuous. I suspect they changed it because continual software upgrades sounds terrifying.
Nordic chip is super impressive and power efficient compared to ESP32
Sounds great, but does it actually mean lock-in, in reality?