December 2024 Summaries

The Blood Agents organization, a Ukrainian NGO, has been working tirelessly to provide life-saving blood donations to patients in need since 2015. They have faced numerous challenges, including a severe donor blood shortage and limited resources. To address these issues, they are developing a new mobile app to improve the donor experience, attract new donors, and connect with existing ones. The team initially struggled with setting up a mobile CI/CD process due to limited resources and expertise. However, after discovering Bitrise, an all-in-one solution for continuous development, testing, and deployment, they were able to automate their processes, reduce manual steps, and increase efficiency. With Bitrise's support, the Blood Agents team has successfully set up their CI/CD pipeline, released their app in a fraction of the time previously required, and is now ready to launch the final version in 2025. The partnership with Bitrise has been instrumental in helping the organization achieve its mission, and they are excited to see the impact their new app will have on their community.

The new feature within Release Management: Build distribution for testing is designed to streamline the process of distributing mobile app builds outside of app stores, allowing developers to share builds with testers and stakeholders more efficiently. With this feature, users can upload Development, Ad-hoc, and Enterprise IPAs and APKs to Release Management from any CI tool and distribute them to their tester groups via Bitrise Release Management. The feature includes tools for managing tester groups, including automatic and manual notifications, as well as securing the installation pages behind Bitrise login credentials. Build distribution is available free of charge, with guides for getting started available on the Bitrise website.

Graph Pipelines is a new feature in Bitrise that enables developers to reduce overall build time by running CI tasks in parallel, offering benefits such as up to 50% reductions in build time, effortless setup and maintenance, and easier pinpointing of build issues and bottlenecks. Unlike the existing Build Pipelines feature, Graph Pipelines has no stages, only dependencies between workflows, allowing for faster build times and reduced waiting time. This feature can help developers reduce their build times, test sharding, and make it easier to pinpoint build issues and bottlenecks, making it ideal for growing teams, scale-ups, and advanced mobile engineering orgs.

As the end of year 2024 approaches, Bitrise will maintain its on-call and support services during the holiday season. However, there will be a stack update freeze period from December 19 to January 6, with only critical fixes being released. For any queries or assistance, customers can reach out through email, sales contact, or Slack.

Git commit statuses provide clear, actionable insights into the progress of code through CI/CD pipelines. Previously, Bitrise presented a single commit status based on the most recent build run, but now developers can configure their Git commit status to include both static and dynamic components using YAML. Dynamic values adapt to project specifics, offering detailed and contextual understanding of each commit status. Static values allow for straightforward, consistent messages but have limited scope. Customizing commit statuses at the workflow or pipeline level provides more control over how each process shares its status. Using YAML reduces the need to dig through the UI and speeds up the workflow while keeping everything organized within the same repository.