OpenFeint investor Peter Relan announced OpenKit, which was described as “the industry’s first completely open platform for backend services for mobile developers, with a guarantee of no lock-in of developer data”.

The launch comes shortly after social gaming company Gree announced the closure of OpenFeint, which it acquired in 2011 – providing developers with less than one month to retrieve their data before it was lost.

Relan said: “With mobile developers facing extreme uncertainty over what happens to their data and their users when a developer platform like OpenFeint gets acquired, or TOS change ala Twitter, there is only one path forward: open it all up and run it in the cloud.”

OpenKit will use an open source toolkit on iOS and Android to plug into “backend services critical to apps in the post-PC era”.

This includes common features such as universal account authorisation and cloud storage, as well as app-specific features such as leaderboards/achievements for game developers.

It was noted that unlike OpenFeint, OpenKit is not intended to be a user network – developers can take their own data and OpenKit source code and host their own backed service.

“This is not a statement on Gree’s decision to transition OpenFeint developers to the Gree platform. They have announced a focus on a publishing model, so a platform API becomes less critical in such a model. This initiative is about the overall sentiment in 2012 regarding developer API’s like Twitter, Facebook, OpenFeint, and the desire developers have to control their own destiny,” Relan said.

Availability for OpenKit is scheduled for January 2013, “assuming a large number of developers sign up to support the launch of the platform”.