October 2023 Summaries

The company is making upgrades to its Teams Plan pricing, which will benefit all customers on the plan at no additional cost. The upgrades include a 45% increase in monthly build credits for tiers 1-10, and automatic upgrades to Velocity Plan for annual customers on higher-tier plans, offering features such as more concurrent builds, buffer, increased build timeout, larger machines, and flexible SSO. These changes aim to provide more value to mobile developers at a competitive price point, making Bitrise the no-brainer choice in the market. The upgrades will be automatically carried out during the next credit cycle, and the company is committed to continuous reassessment of its pricing structures based on customer feedback.

Tuist, a build tool for Xcode projects, has been partially closed-source by its maintainers, forcing Bitrise to deprecate its support. This move raises concerns about the reliance on open-source projects without proper governance, potentially leading to unforeseen challenges in the future. Bitrise is recommending that users reassess using Tuist and consider alternatives like Bazel, a tool with a strong and impartial governance body, which allows for multiple options, including open-source self-hostable projects and no vendor lock-in. The situation highlights the importance of open-source stewardship and community engagement in ensuring the sustainability of open-source software.

At Bitrise, they have successfully completed their SOC 2 report, a security audit conducted by A-LIGN, a trusted technology-enabled security and compliance firm. The SOC 2 report validates Bitrise's commitment to data security and protection, as well as compliance with critical standards to mitigate cybersecurity threats. This report is important for organizations that outsource business operations and services to third-party vendors, as it demonstrates rigorous IT security standards and can bring a competitive advantage to businesses. By achieving this report, Bitrise gains customer trust and ensures its customers' data is secure. The SOC 2 report is a validation of an organization's controls in areas such as information security, access control, vendor management, system backup, business continuity, and disaster relief. It highlights the controls in place that protect and secure an organization's systems or services used by its customers.

The 2023 Mobile DevOps Summit was a two-day event that brought together over 3,500 mobile developers and DevOps professionals from around the world. The summit featured 61 speakers and 56 sessions, including talks on various topics such as releases at scale, server-driven UI, automating iOS release processes, and making apps modular. Key takeaways included the importance of improving the reliability of release processes to achieve faster returns on investment, streamlining workflows with server-driven UI, and reducing friction points in development pipelines through automation and pull requests. The summit also highlighted the benefits of using cloud platforms for mobile app deployment and testing, as well as the value of making apps modular and prioritizing what's changed in CI/CD workflows.

Bitrise has enhanced its support for building with Unity software, providing a more streamlined and efficient development experience for mobile game developers, Unity specialists, and software engineers. The new features include automated license handling, instant Unity software builds, and improved memory options, making it easier to build complex immersive AR/VR experiences without the need for manual license management. With these changes, Bitrise now offers a comprehensive solution for building with Unity software on Apple Vision Pro spatial computer mixed realities, mobile gaming, metaverses, and other immersive platforms, leveraging the advantages of Apple Silicon for faster build times.

There is a known issue with Xcode 15 that results in slow test execution, causing a roughly 25% slowdown compared to Xcode 14.3. To mitigate this problem, Bitrise offers several measures such as using an open-source tool called yeetd, which can improve simulator performance by killing unnecessary processes. Additionally, using faster hardware like the M1 Max machine with substantial CPU and memory resources can also speed up test execution. Customers can keep an eye on stacks.bitrise.io for updates on MacOS and Linux stacks, including the availability of Xcode 15.1 with potential fixes for this issue.