We decided to ship Apollo under a different name to avoid people's preconceptions that a tool released by the creators of Meteor would only work inside the Meteor platform. What we are seeing is that the JavaScript community has been consistently moving towards focused, decoupled tools, and it made sense to build Apollo in that way. Meteor has also received many improvements to make it easy to work with npm packages, new JavaScript features, etc.
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related Q: is it fair to think of this as your pivot from "ecosystem" to "chain of tools" and you needed new branding to make space for this?
We decided to ship Apollo under a different name to avoid people's preconceptions that a tool released by the creators of Meteor would only work inside the Meteor platform. What we are seeing is that the JavaScript community has been consistently moving towards focused, decoupled tools, and it made sense to build Apollo in that way. Meteor has also received many improvements to make it easy to work with npm packages, new JavaScript features, etc.