April 2025 Summaries

The latest Apple Silicon machines, specifically the M4 Pro, are now available for enterprise plan users to accelerate their mobile Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) workflows exclusively on Bitrise, a mobile DevOps cloud platform. The M4 Pro offers up to 30-50% faster iOS Xcode compilation speeds compared to previous models, thanks to its additional performance cores and increased memory capacity of up to 54 GB. This enables mobile teams to handle demanding build tasks with ease, resulting in substantial time savings for CI/CD workflows. M4 Pro machines are now available at no additional cost to all Bitrise enterprise Mobile DevOps Platform plan customers, and users can confirm their use of an M4 Pro machine in the Workflow Editor.

We're excited to attend the AWS Summit in London this year, where we'll be showcasing how Bitrise enhances mobile development workflows on AWS and discussing our latest features and integrations designed to boost developer productivity. As a leader in Mobile DevOps, we empower developers to streamline and scale mobile app development on AWS by integrating seamlessly with your AWS account, leveraging EC2 Mac and EC2 Linux instances for efficient workflows. We'll be at booth B47, exploring how Bitrise supports your specific mobile development challenges and providing a platform that helps you scale workload on EC2 machines, optimize costs, and manage your stack efficiently within the AWS Cloud Controller.

The new environment variables in Bitrise CI enable more intelligent automation and better debugging capabilities, giving mobile development and DevOps teams contextual information to create more thoughtful, efficient workflows. The variables provide insights into build failures, trigger information, pull request intelligence, and code changes, allowing for more targeted and automated workflows.

This article discusses the benefits of test sharding, a technique for parallelizing automated tests to improve CI build times without sacrificing software quality. Test sharding involves dividing a large suite of tests into smaller pieces, which can be executed in parallel on different runners, significantly reducing the time it takes to provide developers with feedback on their changes. By employing test sharding, teams can maintain fast cycle times while ensuring high-quality code. The article provides step-by-step instructions for implementing test sharding using Bitrise's out-of-the-box features, including Parallelism and Xcode Test Shard Calculation, as well as scenarios for Android projects that use Gradle's built-in test sharding calculation. By parallelizing tests via sharding, teams can achieve fast CI builds coupled with a high-quality bar, backed by a large suite of unit and UI tests.

Managing multiple apps with different store accounts has become easier thanks to Bitrise Release Management's latest update, which introduces app-level store connections. This feature allows developers to configure separate store connections for each app within a project, supporting smoother and more secure workflows for teams managing multiple apps across different clients or internal teams. Additionally, API key management is now moving from account level to workspace level, providing better control, enhanced security, and fewer disruptions if a team member leaves the project. With this update, developers can distribute apps efficiently, whether delivering internal builds or publishing to the App Store or Google Play.

Troubleshooting builds just got a lot easier. The new Invocation Diffing feature in Bitrise Build Cache allows you to compare two command invocations side by side to see exactly what changed, helping you identify root causes for performance regressions and unexpected build failures faster. This tool provides a clear side-by-side comparison of two command invocations, eliminating guesswork and providing a faster path to understanding and resolution. It's available now in Bitrise Build Cache, offering users a new way to troubleshoot issues directly from the Invocation Detail page using the Compare button, fully integrated with Bitris Insights for deeper investigation.

The Bitrise MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server is a conversational interface that allows users to interact with their CI platform, such as Bitrise, via natural language. This enables teams to easily manage apps, builds, artifacts, and more through intuitive conversation, making it accessible for engineers at all skill levels. The server provides features like quick onboarding, effortless troubleshooting, optimized configurations, and everyday chores, allowing teams to simplify their workflow and gain clarity. It is built for everyone, from junior developers to engineering leaders, and can be set up with three easy steps, offering a powerful tool for teams to deliver quality apps faster and do more with less.

With Build Priority, you can now "fast-track" important builds to the front of the queue, ensuring they get executed first. This feature allows you to control the order of your builds by assigning a numerical value between –100 and 100 (0 is the default). You can set priority for pipelines, workflows, triggers, or overrides at the Build Start process. When you hit concurrency limits, builds with higher priority run first. You can easily integrate Build Priority into your workflow by setting a priority directly in your Workflow or Pipeline configuration, assigning a priority when configuring Triggers, and overriding the default priority at build start. The feature is beneficial for teams managing multiple projects that often run into concurrency limits, reducing the need for supervision, build aborts, approvals, etc., and streamlining their process.