The Omni Group was informally founded as a NEXTSTEP consulting company in 1989 by Wil Shipley, who immediately brought on Ken Case and Tim Wood.

Omni initially produced custom database software for the NEXTSTEP platform for clients such as the William Morris Agency and McCaw Cellular Communications (then Cingular Wireless; now AT&T Inc.).

During this period they also ported a number of games to NEXTSTEP, then later to Mac OS X (after Apple acquired NeXT in 1997).

The Omni Group also administers several mailing lists related to macOS and software development.

[citation needed] The Omni Group uses many frameworks in their applications,[1] and releases them under an open source license.