June 2025 Summaries

A recent webinar addressed the common issue of long build times faced by engineering teams and highlighted how remote build caching can enhance productivity by reducing these times and improving workflow efficiency. The event revealed that many developers spend as much time waiting for builds as they do writing code, with average mobile team build times ranging from 10 to 30 minutes. Remote build caching, which reuses outputs from previous tasks when inputs remain unchanged, is part of an advanced CI/CD maturity model and has shown to significantly reduce build times, with benchmark tests on open-source projects reporting time reductions of up to 92% without code changes. Although not all projects will see uniform improvements, tools like Bitrise Build Cache help identify bottlenecks and optimize performance, leading to substantial productivity gains and measurable business value through saved developer time and enhanced satisfaction. An example from Maven Clinic demonstrated a 30 to 60 percent improvement in Android build times, facilitating faster iteration and more confident shipping of products.

During the WWDC25, Apple announced a significant change in its versioning system, aligning all OS and software versions to 26, with Xcode 26 set for release in September 2025. Bitrise is preparing to support this update by providing a stable Xcode 26 stack on its platform from day one. This update will bring some breaking changes compared to the older Xcode 16 stacks, offering an opportunity to set modern tooling defaults and implement often-requested changes. Developers are encouraged to test and adapt their workflows using the Xcode 26.0 Edge stack available now, as Apple will require apps to be built with Xcode 26 for App Store submissions starting April 2026. The transition from Edge to Stable stacks marks a critical phase for users, potentially impacting workflows due to breaking changes. Bitrise emphasizes the importance of proactive testing in the Edge stack to foresee and strategize against potential disruptions. Additionally, updates to preinstalled tools like Ruby, Node.js, Flutter, and others are part of this major transition, and Bitrise is committed to providing support to help users adapt smoothly.

Bitrise, a leading mobile DevOps platform, announced plans to establish a data center in the Netherlands to meet the growing demand for data residency within the European Union. This will be the first EU-based data center operated by a DevOps platform, aimed at addressing the stringent data security and compliance requirements in the region. The $3 million investment is part of Bitrise's strategy to support predicted growth in European data center capacity and to enhance operational resilience and data sovereignty. By replicating their successful US infrastructure model, Bitrise will offer EU businesses greater control over their data, helping them to scale development securely and remain competitive. The move is seen as timely due to recent regulatory changes and the need for local data processing solutions, with the European data center market projected to grow significantly. This initiative underscores Bitrise's commitment to providing a compliant and reliable solution for mobile development across the EU and UK, filling a gap left by US-based cloud providers and offering a unique advantage in the DevOps market.

Bitrise has been accepted into the AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program, marking a significant development in its mission to deliver robust mobile DevOps solutions tailored to enterprise needs for security, compliance, and infrastructure flexibility. Now available on the AWS Marketplace, Bitrise offers seamless integration with AWS infrastructure, supporting both EC2 Mac and Linux virtual machines with pre-installed mobile tools and dependencies. This integration allows teams to run mobile builds within their AWS environment, ensuring data sovereignty, simplifying infrastructure management, and reducing operational overhead by handling AWS machine virtualization and optimizing EC2 instances. Bitrise supports cross-platform development for iOS, Android, and other frameworks with customizable Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Setting up Bitrise on AWS is straightforward, allowing for quick deployment through the AWS Marketplace, which also provides simplified billing and procurement processes.

Mobile CI/CD costs are often underestimated, with engineering hours lost to maintenance and upkeep being significant contributors. The Bitrise ROI calculator helps mobile developers put real numbers on these hidden costs by inputting team size, hosting costs, and CI/CD workload. Mobile development presents unique challenges that generalist solutions struggle to address, including infrastructure headaches, complex virtual environments, stack upkeep, DevOps burdens, and productivity black holes. A managed mobile-first platform like Bitrise reduces cost and unlocks efficiency by eliminating these drivers, offering features such as zero infrastructure management, super fast SDK updates, automated stack maintenance, self-serve workflows, built-in observability, smart build caching, integrated release management, and more. By using the ROI calculator, teams can uncover their unique savings and gain insights into how to optimize their mobile infrastructure.

Dániel Balla, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Bitrise, delivered a talk at Money20/20 highlighting the strategic importance of mobile app development in fintech. He emphasized that mobile isn't just a channel but a battleground where consumers judge financial services by high standards set by social media platforms. Fintechs often underestimate mobile development, focusing on compliance and governance at the cost of speed and user experience, resulting in a significant drop-off of users. Balla's research shows that releasing updates weekly can increase user engagement by 80%, but hitting that cadence is challenging due to unique constraints such as faulty releases not being easily roll-backed and security and compliance reviews often blocking releases for weeks or months. To fix the broken process, fintechs should ask themselves three questions: what's stopping them from releasing every other week, how confident are they in their testing strategy, and are they treating their app like a competitive differentiator? Balla advocates for investing in platform engineering teams to automate and standardize release processes, which can integrate security into the development lifecycle, automate repetitive tasks, and create a feedback-rich environment that accelerates innovation. By rethinking their app release strategy from the inside out, fintechs must start treating mobile as a core competitive differentiator to avoid getting left behind in the mobile-first economy.

With the introduction of release note presets and per-release metadata control, Bitrise Release Management now offers two significant features to simplify the process of creating and managing localized app releases. By defining standardized templates for release notes, teams can save time on repetitive work and ensure consistency across languages. The new features also provide granular control over localization management, allowing teams to fine-tune content exactly where and when needed. With these updates, Bitrise aims to help developers release faster with less friction, making it easier to manage multilingual apps at scale.