For the last five years, one of the constant factors in informing us about new builds of Windows has been BuildFeed. The service, developed by Tom Hounsell, has delivered thousands of build numbers and build strings.
But now, BuildFeed is shutting down, and it"s pretty clear that Hounsell doesn"t have much of a choice. In fact, yesterday was a pretty interesting day for the service, which can be found on Twitter under @BuildFeed. A build string showed up for a version of Windows 10 that"s aimed at foldable devices, and shortly after that, there was a tweet from the account addressing some apparent concerns with the leak.
Following that, a bunch more builds showed up with strange build strings, such as rs_onecore_sigma_media, rs_es_infra_red, rs_xbox_dev_flight_neptune, and a bunch more. In the notice that BuildFeed is shutting down, which is right on the site"s homepage, Hounsell notes that these all came from a Microsoft employee that posted them. He also noted that Microsoft is most certainly one of the pressures that led to the service shutting down.
But there"s good news. While Hounsell will no longer be hosting BuildFeed, the whole thing is open source on GitLab, so it would seem that another project could take its place. The database has also been made available, placed in a JSON file.
Update: Hounsell has noted that BuildFeed has never been issued a cease and desist letter from Microsoft, and the closing of the site had to do with unspecified "internal pressures". He went on to say that:
Indeed, ultimately, the internal pressures are ultimately the deciding factor. Those of you that know me, know that I am not one to merely accept someone elses" orders, even if they are from a large multinational corporation. However, it has for a while been a question of "When" rather than "If" for BuildFeed"s closure, and I"ll admit that this incident merely brought things to a head. In the end, I felt it better to jump rather than be pushed, and get ahead of things before external factors started making decisions for me.