Matching The World Of Mobile Apps To The Need For Speed

Friday, 18 August 2023, 8:50 am
Opinion: Hugh Grant

A mobile continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform is becoming increasingly important in today’s technological world. It essentially automates the tedious manual work traditionally needed to build, test, and deploy a mobile application.

This set of practices and tools enables developers to deliver software updates more frequently and reliably. It is essential to have a top performing pipeline, in order to keep both customers happy and the company’s functions running as smoothly as possible.

A CI/CD pipeline is needed more than ever as the demand for mobile apps continues to skyrocket. There are roughly 7.33 billion mobile users worldwide, which is almost the entirety of the human population. Mobile apps are used by the users to run tasks for everything ranging from accessing a bank account to counting calories. A reflection of this massive demand can be found in the more than 255 billion mobile apps that were downloaded worldwide in 2022 alone. This number will only continue to grow as society becomes more reliant on mobile devices. The demand for mobile app developers is predicted to rise from 17% to 24% by 2026.

Accompanying this massive increase in demand for mobile apps is the rising demand for their speedy production. 60% of developers are saying that code moves into production faster than previous years. 35% says that code is being released twice as fast as they did in 2021, while 15% are releasing code 3-5x faster. In just a short amount of time, developers have sharply increased the pace of their coding, which means they are relying on the abilities of CI/CD to stay ahead of the curve.

There are some real world complications that are slowing down mobile app production. There is a labor shortage of engineers with the highly specialized mobile development skills and experience needed for Mobile DevOps. There has also been an increase in evolving customer demands and expectations that leads to high uninstall rates. Buggy releases will push customers away, so there is little room for mistakes in the mobile space. There is a lot of inflation in the industry, with costs related to salaries, benefits, and even cloud-based service platforms being set to rise. However, 85% of SaaS companies have not raised their prices to match, meaning there is little room for errors.

35% of developers say that they have a fully onboarded CI/CD pipeline within their organization, but this should be far more given the huge benefits of these pipelines. Mobile app developers who are leveraging this technology are able to catch bugs far before the app reaches production. 50% of the workflow failures happen within an hour or less. They are able to provide seamless mobile experiences that exceed even the growing customer expectations while releasing improvements faster. This translates to better ratings and more engaged customers.

Mobile CI/CD automates all of the manual tasks, leaving the developers mentally free to focus on creating better apps at a faster rate. Elite developers who meet their reliability targets are 3.7x more likely to use continuous testing, 4.1x more likely to use continuous delivery, and 5.8x more likely to use continuous integration. It has been able to simplify maintenance and upgrades, enhance test reliability, increase developer satisfaction, boost customer satisfaction, and reduce overall costs.

Bitrise is one of the mobile DevOps platform industry leaders built around mobile CI/CD. It has 100k developers, 2m+ builds per month, and 6k+ customers. It offers cutting edge services such as build and test caching, advanced build pipelines management, release management, and supports both native and cross-platform development. Platforms such as Bitrise allow developers to automate, test, and release apps with confidence.

ENDS

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