September 2021 Summaries

At the end of January 2022, Bitrise will stop supporting Xamarin and remove all VS4 Mac stacks, deprecating Xamarin Steps and Visual Studio for Mac stacks in October 2021. This decision was made to focus efforts on other technologies with similar infrastructure requirements, allowing for better support for developers and users. The transition may cause issues for those currently using Xamarin on Bitrise, but the company will do its best to make it as smooth as possible. Developers who use Visual Studio for Mac stacks are advised to migrate their Workflows to macOS stacks if they're not using Xamarin.

If a company wants to deliver high-quality mobile apps, it should focus on internal quality first, which means prioritizing good code architecture and investing in a reliable deployment pipeline using a mobile-focused CI/CD tool like Bitrise. This will enable the development team to catch bugs early, improve release cycles, reduce testing time, and ultimately save costs in the long run by reducing the need for rework, redesigning, and other costly fixes. By doing so, companies can strike a balance between quality, cost, and speed, delivering fast and reliable apps that meet customer expectations without sacrificing too much on any of these fronts. Focusing on internal quality first allows developers to optimize all three factors simultaneously, rather than making trade-offs between them. This approach is supported by the project management triangle, which shows that changes in one constraint require changes in others to compensate, or quality would suffer. By prioritizing quality, companies can reduce their reliance on costly fixes and improve their overall competitiveness in the mobile app industry.

As a fresh graduate, Zaid was drawn to Bitrise's clear mission and vision, as well as its startup culture, which combined tech and sales. He was impressed by the recruitment process and team behind the company, which he found highly motivated and intelligent. As Sales Development Team Leader for EMEA, Zaid works closely with marketing and growth teams to execute new strategies and support existing customers. The team's proactive attitude and work ethic inspire him daily, and he is driven by Bitrise's value of moving with urgency and focus. Zaid believes in hands-on learning, preferring to experience things firsthand and experiment to improve processes. If not working at Bitrise, he would be a pilot, admiring aviation and its dynamics.

As a developer advocate at Bitrise, Moataz shares his experiences and insights on the role, which involves being an engineer, content creator, community builder, and facilitator. He highlights that DAs act as bridges between the engineering team and the developer community, sharing knowledge and providing feedback to improve products. A typical day for Moataz includes attending stand-up meetings, prioritizing tasks, checking social media channels, creating content, collaborating with teams, and engaging with the community. He emphasizes the importance of being a continuous learner, building real-world applications, and effective communication to be an outstanding DA.

Users are increasingly preferring mobile apps over mobile websites for their seamless and engaging shopping experiences, driven by the need for speed, extra features, and functionalities that native apps offer. Mobile apps have become an essential tool for e-commerce businesses to build customer loyalty, increase conversion rates, and drive revenue growth, as they provide a flawless user experience, save users' data, and facilitate one-click payments, making the checkout process faster and easier. By investing in mobile apps, companies can enhance their UX, gather real-time information about customers, and offer personalized product suggestions, ultimately increasing ROI, strengthening brand awareness, and building long-term relationships with customers.

This framework allows developers to build native mobile apps for iOS and Android using a single shared JavaScript or TypeScript codebase. It is built on top of the Expo CLI tool, which provides an easy-to-use interface for creating React Native projects. End-to-end testing is a technique used to test the entire application flow, simulating real user scenarios. Detox is a gray box E2E testing automation framework that tests mobile apps on real devices or simulators/emulators, interacting with them like a real user. It supports React Native projects as well as pure native ones and has features such as cross-platform testing, running on devices, avoiding flakiness, executing tests on CI platforms, and using Jest or Mocha test runners. To use Detox, developers need to set up their environment with macOS 10.15 or higher, XCode 11 or higher, Node.js, NPM, Watchman, Homebrew, React Native CLI or Expo CLI, CocoaPods, Java JDK +8, and Android Studio, Android SDK, and Virtual Device. The Detox configuration file can be customized to match the app's build variants, binary path, devices, and other configurations. Changes for Android apps require adding native Detox dependencies, installing Android Espresso, and configuring network-security exemptions. E2E tests need to be modified to match the app's steps. To integrate Detox with Bitrise, developers can create a free account, set up their repository access, configure build configuration, add integration Steps, and run Detox Build and Test scripts. The final step is sending a Slack message with the build status.

Feature flags are configuration variables used to enable or disable features in an application. They allow mobile engineering teams to deploy new features instantly without going through the app store, reducing the risk of introducing bugs and ensuring that users can test new features safely. Feature flags can be used for various scenarios such as product and marketing campaigns, A/B testing, subscription management, and opt-in early access campaigns. However, their use can also lead to increased technical debt, code complexity, and testing complexity if not managed properly. To optimize mobile deployments with feature flags, it's essential to establish best practices, such as using a sensible naming convention, controlling access, and limiting the life span of feature flags. Various implementation paths exist, including config files, database configs, open-source libraries, and third-party services.