January 2023 Summaries

Developers want fast pipelines and easy security, while security teams aim to protect the business, resulting in high-quality mobile apps on time that support the business and excite mobile users. Prioritizing speed over quality can lead to serious consequences such as data theft, user risk, compliance violations, and damage to the business. A "secure-by-design" development model, like the Mobile DevSecOps Framework, allows organizations to quickly release high-quality mobile apps with built-in security and privacy. Implementing a Mobile DevSecOps Blueprint leveraging Bitrise and NowSecure can help teams achieve these goals by establishing mobile policy via standards for optimization, providing mobile appsec training for continuous improvement, crafting mobile security-specific requirements, facilitating secure mobile code development, automating appsec testing for continuous security, embedding dev remediation for faster repair, running periodic guided testing and pen testing, performing final battery of pre-release pen testing, monitoring production app store for continuous security, and integrating the NowSecure platform with Bitrise workflows. By adopting these strategies, organizations can improve release cycles, reduce security issues, and deliver quality mobile apps to users.

The performance of Android projects on Apple silicon M1 machines has been benchmarked, revealing significant differences between Java 11 and Java 17 in terms of performance. The results show that Java 17 offers substantial optimization over Java 11, resulting in faster build times for Android projects on M1 machines. This is particularly notable for projects with sequential build tasks, such as code linting and security scanning, where the gain can be substantial. The findings suggest that upgrading to Java 17 can lead to a no-brainer performance improvement, especially for teams looking to optimize their builds for Apple silicon. Additionally, the use of Bitrise's scalable solution has been shown to significantly reduce build times for Android projects on M1 machines, with some customers achieving reductions of over 50%. The results highlight the potential benefits of building Android projects on Apple silicon M1 machines and provide valuable insights for mobile teams looking to optimize their builds.

Customers can use fastlane and fastlane Match on Bitrise to manage code signing for multiple apps at scale. fastlane Match is a tool that allows developers to securely store their signing certificates and provisioning profiles in a Git repository, and to automatically download the latest versions of these files when building and releasing apps. With the Fastlane Match Step, Bitrise takes care of the code signing process for you, by cloning your private certificate/profile repository and registering those certificates and profiles in the keychain. fastlane Match supports different storage options such as Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3, allowing developers to securely store their signing assets in a shared repository like GitHub. To set up fastlane Match, developers need to create a new lane in their Fastfile that uses the match action, specify the type of signing assets they want to create or maintain, and use the match command to import existing certificates and profiles or generate new ones. When using fastlane Match on Bitrise, developers can add the Fastlane Match step to their workflow before building their app, configure the step with their Git URL, branch, App ID, Match Password, Platform, and Team ID, and run their build to ensure that code signing works correctly.

Caching is a data-management heuristic that allows developers to reuse previously created information, such as files or data, instead of creating it again from scratch. In the context of mobile CI/CD systems, caching relates to moving data between isolated builds, eliminating the need for extra steps like bootstrapping the environment and downloading dependencies, which can take precious execution time. By storing required content locally, caching reduces the need to access remote servers or the internet, making build times faster and optimizing workflows. This concept is similar to a cooking analogy, where ingredients are stored in a refrigerator to save time, and similarly, data is cached to retrieve it faster from memory rather than disk. Caching can be applied to software dependencies, saving time by eliminating the need to download them off the internet when running builds on local systems.

Laksh Ranganathan is the Director of Product Operations at Bitrise, a company aiming to make a real-world impact for billions of app users every day. She has a diverse background, having worked as an Engineer, Business Analyst, Product Manager, and Product Consultant before joining Bitrise. Laksh is proud to be a mother to a 6-year-old son who teaches her about management and leadership. As a woman in the tech industry, she faces challenges but has learned to navigate them by being proactive, seeking support, and surrounding herself with positive people. In her role at Bitrise, Laksh collaborates across teams to achieve operational excellence and supports R&D teams. She finds motivation in knowing she can make an impact and is driven by opportunities for growth and learning. Her advice to other women is to be bold, ask for help, and prioritize self-care to overcome obstacles and succeed in the industry.

Dashboards are a new feature in Bitrise Insights that allow users to create shared interactive favorites for viewing important metrics. They provide a convenient place to view key data, enabling daily or weekly checks for an overview of critical metrics. Dashboards can be created on a workspace level and shared with others within the company, streamlining workflow and saving time by providing easy access to essential information. With Dashboards, users can make data-driven decisions and stay on top of their most important metrics quickly and easily.

The Bitrise team is updating its simulator runtime policy to align with Apple's minimum requirements and supported SDKs for Xcode, which will inevitably lead to the deprecation of older versions of the Xcode simulator runtimes. The new policy prioritizes newer versions of Xcode and ensures that the latest compatible simulator runtime is available across all stacks. This approach means that older simulator runtimes will be phased out as the oldest actively updated version of Xcode increases, while also supporting the most recent versions of iOS simulator runtimes prior to the oldest major version included in the stacks. The policy applies to both iOS, tvOS, and watchOS simulator runtimes, with the next most recent runtime being made available where compatible.

We're changing the way we provide Xcode versions to our macOS stacks users. Previously, each Xcode version on Bitrise was available on an isolated virtual machine (VM) image, causing long queue times and technical limitations during migration between Xcode versions. To solve this, Bitrise will now provide multiple versions of Xcode per VM image, enabling a better migration experience while allowing builds to start as close to immediately as possible.

We're kicking off the new year with a deep dive into Mobile DevOps best practices. Join us for a seven-part webinar series where we hear from Bitrise's Solution Engineers about building and releasing better mobile apps. With over 50 years of combined experience in the mobile space, Bitrise's Solution Engineers will walk you through tips and best practices to showcase how they've successfully helped some of the world’s biggest apps. The webinars cover various topics such as massive parallelization, configuration as code, automated processes, test automation, infrastructure management, optimizing tests, and releasing for mobile with an automated process. The series is led by experienced Solution Engineers Ben Boral, Gen Citro, Tamas Bazsonyi, and Nick Sanjines who share their expertise on improving Mobile DevOps practices.

The conversation between Matt Robinson and Stephane Copin highlights the importance of using data in day-to-day decision making for mobile teams. They discussed how data from Bitrise Insights and other tools helps them measure success, optimize workflows, and make better feature decisions. The team at Compass uses data to analyze their workflows, identify potential problems, and optimize their code and project system, resulting in a decrease in build time from 16 minutes to 12 minutes. Matt emphasizes the importance of measuring key metrics such as app binary size, compile time, build time, credit usage, test stability of UI and unit tests, and code coverage to optimize the app delivery process. Post-release, they monitor crash rates, error rates, user-related metrics, and Apple phased release data to optimize app performance. The team identifies critical bottlenecks by analyzing data and having a concrete relationship with guiding stars such as reducing engineer wait time. The panel discussion emphasizes the role of data in accelerating and excelling in mobile app delivery.

Mobile app development has become increasingly complex, with larger teams and more diverse modules required to serve millions of users worldwide. One of the challenges faced by mobile teams is device and OS fragmentation, where different devices and operating systems can cause performance issues or display problems. To address this challenge, continuous testing has been introduced as a practice of testing software as part of the development process, rather than waiting until the end of the development cycle to perform testing. Sauce Labs is a cloud-based testing platform that allows mobile engineers to run automated and manual tests on a wide range of virtual and real devices, using tools such as Espresso and XCUITest. By integrating Sauce Labs with Bitrise, a Mobile DevOps platform, developers can easily run their mobile UI tests on every code change, pull request, tag, or during nightly builds, reducing the time and effort required to test applications manually and catching issues early on in the development process.