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Tag: Bitrise

  • Bitrise to Invest $3M in DevOps Cloud for Mobile Apps in EU

    Bitrise to Invest $3M in DevOps Cloud for Mobile Apps in EU

    Bitrise, a provider of a DevOps platform for building mobile applications, plans to invest $3 million to create data centers in the European Union (EU) that meet sovereign cloud requirements.

    Company CEO Barnabás Birmacher said Bitrise has spent much of the past year integrating its stack and consolidating the infrastructure it needs to support its platform in the U.S. Now, Bitrise is taking the next step toward ensuring that any data used to build a mobile application doesn’t leave the EU at a time when many organizations are either voluntarily deciding to depend less on IT infrastructure in the U.S. or are being required to use IT infrastructure in a specific geographic region.

    To satisfy those requirements, Bitrise is acquiring the server and storage infrastructure it requires, which is then housed in a data center facility in Amsterdam that is owned by a third-party provider. That approach ensures that at any point necessary those servers and storage systems can be moved to another data center, noted Birmacher.

    Regardless of location, the data centers will be based on the same Apple M4 and Linux-based infrastructure that Bitrise has built a DevOps platform on top of to streamline the building and deployment of mobile applications.

    It’s not clear how fragmented software engineering is about to become as teams are required to ensure that application development projects only access data located in specific regions. Many DevOps teams have been relying on software-as-a-service (SaaS) application platforms that are designed to scale out across multiple geographic regions as additional compute resources have been needed. With the rise of sovereign cloud requirements, however, providers of those platforms need to ensure that any data being accessed never leaves a specific region.

    That issue can be especially challenging for organizations that may have relied on highly distributed teams of developers that may reside in multiple countries.

    In fact, one of the reasons more organizations are relying on the managed DevOps services that Bitrise provides is to help minimize that complexity, said Birmacher.

    As the pace of mobile application development continues to accelerate, more organizations are looking to rely on managed DevOps services, added Birmacher. They simply can’t afford to not only only build a DevOps platform, but also maintain, update and secure it, he noted. That’s especially the case when it comes to building mobile applications simply because there isn’t a lot of forgiveness when it comes to, for example, having to rollback an application once it’s been made available in an app store, so ensuring that every test has been properly conducted is crucial, said Birmacher.

    Regardless of who actually manages a DevOps environment, the need to continuously update mobile applications created additional challenges. End users expect that new features and capabilities will be added at a regular cadence. The number of organizations that can afford to invest in their own DevOps environment, as a percentage of those building mobile applications, remains comparatively small. So for the bulk of them, the only way to ensure best software engineering practices are being consistently followed is, after all, to rely on a service.

  • Bitrise Tightens Mobile DevOps Integration With AWS Cloud Services

    Bitrise Tightens Mobile DevOps Integration With AWS Cloud Services

    Bitrise this week will tighten integration with its DevOps platform for building and deploying mobile applications and the application development services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

    Announced at the AWS re:Invent 2023 conference, the goal is to provide easier access to automated building, testing and release management capabilities provided by AWS as part of an effort to increase overall efficiency.

    Bitrise CEO Barnabas Birmacher said those capabilities will streamline workflows for a Bitrise Mobile DevOps platform that has been specifically designed for building and deploying mobile applications that typically need to be updated frequently.

    Based on a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform developed by Bitrise that can be deployed in an AWS cloud computing environment, the integrations will make it simpler to build and run mobile applications at scale, noted Birmacher.

    The goal is to reduce the total cost of building mobile applications while at the same time improving developer productivity for mobile applications that have to be thoroughly tested before being made accessible via an application store, he added.

    It’s not clear how many organizations will prefer to have a dedicated CI/CD platform for building and deploying mobile applications versus using the same CI/CD platform they might already be relying on to build and deploy other applications. Bitrise claims to have more than 6,000 customers, including Reddit, WISE, Equinox and Philips Hue.

    As the percentage of mobile applications that make up an organization’s portfolio continues to increase, the pace at which those applications need to be updated lends itself better to a CI/CD platform optimized for those types of applications, said Birmacher.
    In fact, a recent survey conducted by Bitrise found 62% of respondents have been adversely impacted by manual processes that slowed the rate at which mobile applications were deployed and updated. The survey also found (44%) of respondents reported their release approval process is mostly or entirely manual, with only 9% having fully automated application releases.

    The survey also found that nearly two-thirds of organizations (66%) have deployed applications that can’t be opened in two seconds or less, which is widely considered the accepted level of performance required for mobile applications. In addition, three-quarters of organizations (75%) required more than two days to address bug fixes.

    Many mobile apps have become increasingly mission-critical thanks to digital business transformation initiatives. Consequently, the amount of focus on them within most organizations is high; any issues that arise are likely to be noticed at the highest echelons of an organization. That level of attention can easily put pressure on DevOps teams, mainly because the general expectation among end users is that mobile applications will be regularly updated with new functionality. However, if release processes are largely manual, regularly improving the user experience can become problematic.

    Each IT organization will need to decide for itself how best to go about building and deploying mobile applications, but the one thing that is certain is adjustments to DevOps workflows will need to be made as a lot more of these applications are continuously built, deployed and updated.

  • Report Surfaces DevOps Challenges for Mobile Applications

    Report Surfaces DevOps Challenges for Mobile Applications

    An assessment of 1,600 DevOps teams involved in building and deploying mobile applications found that 62% were adversely impacted by manual processes that slowed the rate at which these applications were deployed and updated.

    Based on the Mobile DevOps Assessment (MODAS) created by Bitrise, a provider of a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform for building and deploying mobile applications, the metric measured the creation, testing, deployment, monitoring and collaboration phases of building and deploying applications.

    The survey also found (44%) of respondents reported their release approval process is mostly or entirely manual, with only 9% having fully automated application releases. Only 22% of teams said they’ve been able to complete internal release processes in less than an hour.

    The survey also found that nearly two-thirds of organizations (66%) have deployed applications that can’t be opened in two seconds or less, which is widely considered the accepted level of performance required.

    In addition, three-quarters of organizations (75%) required more than two days to address bug fixes. Only 21% of teams said that they had implemented some form of app performance monitoring to keep track of bugs, the report found.

    Daniel Balla, chief strategy officer for Bitrise, said MODAS applies many of the concepts from the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics that Google now oversees. Those metrics, however, are not specifically designed to assess mobile application development initiatives, he noted.

    It’s not clear what percentage of applications DevOps teams are building today are deployed on mobile devices. But given the emphasis on digital business transformation initiatives, many of these applications are increasingly mission-critical to organizations. The general expectation among mobile application end users is that apps will be regularly updated with new functionality. However, if release processes are largely manual, regularly improving the user experience can become problematic. In addition to the increased likelihood that mistakes will be made, manual processes are often the reason why a vulnerability was introduced into an application environment.

    DevOps teams will also need to also consider the level of scale that will be required to support mobile app development, noted Balla. Many of the tools that developers rely on today to build applications were not necessarily designed to enable developers to build and deploy mobile applications at scale, he added.

    Finally, most enterprise applications need to run on multiple devices, so the tools used to create these applications can’t focus on applications that can only run on one platform, said Balla.

    Regardless of the approach to building and deploying mobile applications, the amount of focus on them within most organizations is high; any issues that arise are likely to be noticed by the highest echelons of an organization. That level of attention can easily put pressure on DevOps teams that frequently work on multiple projects. The challenge and the opportunity now is to create a set of DevOps workflows optimized for mobile applications that almost by definition require much more frequent updates than any other type of application.

  • Bitrise Expedites Neo Financial’s Mobile App Build Time and Delivery

    Bitrise Automates Mobile App Deployment for The Fintech Unicorn, Allowing It to Release Features Weekly to Apple and Android Marketplaces

    San Francisco, CA, January 12, 2023 — Bitrise, the Mobile DevOps company whose platform maximizes the overall business impact of apps for the world’s most sophisticated mobile organizations, today announced the results of its work to automate mobile app development for Neo Financial, Canada’s next-generation financial technology company. Working with Bitrise, Neo has significantly cut its build time for mobile processes, allowing its team to release more frequent mobile features. Neo has over one million members, and is one of the fastest Canadian companies to reach ‘unicorn’ status following its $145M Series C funding round in May of 2022.

    For hundreds of years, Canada’s banking landscape has been dominated by five major incumbent financial institutions that hold over $4 trillion of the country’s assets. But, despite their long-standing history, these banks have been slow to digitize and introduce new capabilities. This ultimately formed a void between Canada’s financial offerings and the evolving demands of today’s mobile consumer.

    For a newcomer to bridge this gap, bringing banking outside the confines of brick-and-mortar buildings and onto consumer-friendly mobile platforms was only the first step. It also required addressing features like account security, easy-to-understand transaction details, and credit score monitoring that Canadians consider most valuable in a mobile banking experience, according to Insider Intelligence.

    Through its partnership with Bitrise and its second generation GEN2 machines, Neo saw further efficiencies throughout its mobile development and release processes and has increased the app’s frequency of feature releases and app updates to a weekly cadence.

    “Reimagining the way Canadians bank is no small undertaking, and our partnership with Bitrise has enabled our team to not only accelerate our mobile development and release time, but focus our resources on building innovative products and features for all Canadians,” said Kris Read, Co-founder and CTO, Neo Financial.

    Investors have recognized Neo’s release speed as its key differentiator in today’s crowded fintech market. According to Andrew McCormack of Valar Ventures, the pace Neo releases new products is among the fastest Valar Ventures has seen, and, “as a result, Neo can be the biggest disruption the Canadian banking industry has seen in decades, and their influence on financial services available to Canadians will impact the lives of millions.”

    With the support of Bitrise’s automation, Neo’s engineering team continues to expand their products and features. In addition to standard banking and savings offerings, Neo’s mobile app now includes everything from Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) options for consumers and businesses, to Canada’s first fully digital and actively managed investment experience, and an online mortgage product with renewal and refinancing options.

    “A mobile app is no longer just an accessory for banks. In order to succeed, mobile needs to become a prominent aspect of banks’ business models,” said Barnabás Birmacher, CEO of Bitrise. “Neo’s success shows that, when development is handled efficiently, mobile has the power to transform the banking industry.”

    Bitrise works with more than 6,000 companies worldwide to deliver on the growing demand for mobile products. For fintech companies, this means automating vital stages of the app development lifecycle including regular security checks and testing to prevent bugs and delayed delivery of new mobile features.

    About Bitrise

    Bitrise is a Mobile DevOps company, whose platform is used by more than 6,000 businesses to maximize the business impact of their mobile apps. Working with Bitrise, the world’s most sophisticated mobile organizations get their apps to market faster, improve security and keep up with constantly changing mobile requirements. Bitrise enables organizations to automate testing, accelerate build times, and quickly understand how new pieces of code will affect live apps. Customers such as Transferwise(now “WISE”), Virgin Mobile, Grindr, Tag Heuer, Compass, Mozilla, Philips Hue, Babbe, Neo Financial and others use Bitrise to rapidly respond to the changing mobile landscape. Bitrise is a Y Combinator company, headquartered in Budapest, with offices in London, San Francisco, Boston and Osaka.

  • Bitrise Acquires Flare.Build to Provide Companies of Any Size an Integrated Solution for Bazel

    The Acquisition Will Give More Than 6,000 Companies The Ability to Implement the Resource-Prohibitive Google Software, Previously Only Accessible by Enterprise Teams

    San Francisco, CA (October 13, 2022) — Bitrise, the Mobile DevOps company whose platform maximizes the overall business impact of apps for the world’s most sophisticated mobile organizations, today announced the acquisition of Flare.Build. Flare Build Systems, Inc. is the first company outside of Google to provide the backend services needed to realize the full potential of the Bazel build system. Bitrise will integrate Flare’s product suite and expertise into its Mobile DevOps Ecosystem, continuing Flare’s work to increase developer productivity at enterprises and startups alike. This acquisition is part of Bitrise’s larger mission to equip mobile product organizations with the tools to manage and automate mobile operations and core workflows, all from a single platform. 

    While Bazel has seen widespread adoption among mobile-first technology companies including Pinterest, LinkedIn, Lyft, Uber, Slack, Tinder and Reddit, it is time and resource intensive to adopt, and challenging to scale. Even after a successful migration to Bazel—a process that can take an entire dedicated team up to a year to accomplish—there’s still much work to be done on building and operationalizing the backend services necessary to power Bazel’s key features. Building these services, which include shared build cache and distributed builds, is daunting for smaller development teams and often not cost effective even for large enterprises.

    Bitrise is solving this multi-million dollar problem for businesses by tying together each of the individual components necessary to deliver on the promise of Bazel in one integrated solution. In adding this solution to Bitrise’s existing Mobile DevOps platform, development teams of all sizes, across various industries, can now reap the benefits of Bazel quickly and effectively, whether they have used the tools before or not. The simplified process also improves developer experience (DevX), boosts engineering productivity, and increases ROI. 

    With the integration of Flare.Build, Bitrise is now also providing benefits for mobile teams through other build tools, such as Gradle, Tuist, and Xcode, even without Bazel. By adapting Flare.Build’s advanced caching and CDN technology to these other tools, Bitrise users will have the ability to speed up feedback loops, iterate faster, and multiply their app build performance by up to 10x. 

    “Flare.Build’s technology, alongside our existing solutions, puts us one step closer to giving mobile product organizations everything they need to expand their mobile app capabilities from one platform, and positively influence the impact that apps have on their organizations,” said Barnabás Birmacher, CEO of Bitrise. “With this new expertise, we are providing access to the performance gains that Bazel users expect without the drastic cost usually associated with the powerful but complex tool.”

    Bitrise is now eight years into building a mobile ecosystem that closes the chasm between the world’s growing demand for mobile products and the ability of today’s mobile organizations to deliver on that demand. In addition to the acquisition of Flare.Build, Bitrise has been furthering this mission by releasing other solutions to help development teams overcome barriers in the build process. For example, Bitrise  recently built and released the world’s first virtualized Apple silicon CI/CD environment to help development teams transition to M1 as Intel is phased out. The company also introduced Build Pipelines, a solution that allows developers to organize the entire CI/CD process, and multiple other products designed to address the challenges that uniquely plague mobile teams. 

    “Faster build and test pipelines enable both higher quality and more frequent releases, allowing mobile companies to iterate quickly and deliver a better product to end-users,” said Zach Gray, Founder of Flare.Build. “Bazel has made a major impact in this area for Google and other industry leaders, but has remained out of reach for the majority of engineering teams. It is clear that the wider mobile industry is ready for a true Bazel-native CI platform that combines scalable macOS compute infrastructure, CI pipelines, build insights and distributed builds all into one cohesive integrated solution. We are thrilled to be working on this as part of Bitrise.”

    With each new addition to its ecosystem, Bitrise enables companies, ranging from visionary SMBs to established enterprises, to elevate their mobile product proficiencies and capabilities to compete in the mobile space. 

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    About Bitrise
    Bitrise is a Mobile DevOps company, whose platform is used by more than 6,000 businesses to maximize the business impact of their mobile apps. Working with Bitrise, the world’s most sophisticated mobile organizations get their apps to market faster, improve security and keep up with constantly changing mobile requirements.  Bitrise enables organizations to automate testing, accelerate build times, and quickly understand how new pieces of code will affect live apps. Customers such as Transferwise (now “WISE”), Virgin Mobile, Grindr, Marks & Spencer, Tag Heuer, Compass, Mozilla, Philips Hue, Babbel and others use Bitrise to rapidly respond to the changing mobile landscape.  Bitrise is a Y Combinator company, headquartered in Budapest, with offices in London, San Francisco, Boston and Osaka.

  • Bitrise Releases New Mobile Devops Platform to Get App Updates to Market Up to 50% Faster

    Compass and other Early Trial Users See Double-Digit Speed Improvements to App Development Processes and Releases Cycles Using the Enterprise-Grade Mobile CI/CD Infrastructure

    San Francisco, CA, June 17, 2021 — Bitrise, the mobile DevOps company that the world’s most well-known companies rely on to get mobile apps and updates to market faster, today announced the release of its new enterprise-grade mobile DevOps platform. The company collaborated with 12 companies, including real estate market disruptor Compass, in private beta for six months to increase the speed of every continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process that runs on Bitrise. The result is Bitrise’s second-generation platform, which is now available to the company’s more than 6,000 global customers and over 100,000 users.

    Over the past year, the rate of mobile adoption has accelerated the equivalent of two to three years. Mobile technology requirements are also changing rapidly, increasing the need for speed and constant adaptation by mobile organizations. The pressure on these companies is compounded by the fact that app store rankings and visibility are directly influenced by frequency of release cycles: the more frequent the releases, the better. All of this has cemented mobile as the platform where markets are won and lost.

    To outpace this accelerated rate of progression, Bitrise set out to increase the speed of all of its automated processes–or builds–by up to 50%. These processes include everything from building an app and running regular tests to understanding how new pieces of code affect apps and testing new updates before shipping to the app store.

    Considering that larger companies can run tens of thousands of builds per month, and that each build can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to two hours, increasing the speed of these processes can save thousands of hours of developers’ time.

    Bitrise selected a dozen of the world’s most advanced mobile-first organizations to trial its second-generation platform before releasing it widely. Early trial users, including real estate platform Compass, reported speed improvements to their app development processes and release cycles, ranging from 30% – 50%.

    For sophisticated mobile organizations, which release new updates, on average, once every two weeks, a botched update can cost millions of dollars. As a result, these companies don’t only rely on Bitrise for increased speed-to-market; they also use the platform to minimize potential negative end-user experiences by continuously merging and testing changes, and creating environments from which they can confidently submit updates to app stores.

    “Mobile teams are increasingly responsible for driving business success. Our mission at Bitrise is to continuously make our infrastructure faster, more scalable, more secure and better equipped to support them,” said Arpad Kun, VP of Infrastructure at Bitrise. “The initial ideas for our second-generation infrastructure began taking shape over a year ago, then we challenged ourselves with a very ambitious goal: Make the platform 50% faster. This triggered our team’s competitive side and kicked everyone into high gear, making the new platform even better than we had originally anticipated.”

    “Switching to Bitrise’s Gen-2 machines has increased the speed of our builds by 30%, by decreasing our average build times from 21.3 minutes to 14.8 minutes,” said Thomas Baji, the iOS engineer who led the migration at Compass. “Additionally, the improved machine performance decreased our yearly CI costs by 71%. This cost saving and improved performance has allowed us to move faster and deliver bold changes to our customers.”

    The second generation infrastructure is part of Bitrise’s growing Mobile DevOps Ecosystem, which includes its CI/CD platform, partner network and user community. It’s available in Bitrise’s Enterprise Build Platform and its newly launched Velocity Plan.
    In 2021, Bitrise will focus on customer co-creation and collaboration as one of the main methods of advancing its products.
    Bitrise recently joined the newly formed Mobile Native Foundation, and has a number of upcoming launches slated for the rest of the year.

    About Bitrise
    Bitrise is a mobile devops company, whose CI/CD platform is used by more than 6,000 businesses to get apps to market faster, improve security, and keep up with constantly changing mobile requirements. Bitrise enables the world’s most sophisticated mobile organizations, including half of all mobile unicorn startups, to automate testing, accelerate build times, and quickly understand how new pieces of code will affect live apps. Customers such as Transferwise (now “WISE”), Virgin Mobile, Grindr, Tonal, Compass, Mozilla, Philips Hue, Babbel and others use Bitrise to rapidly respond to the changing mobile landscape. Bitrise is a Y Combinator company, headquartered in Budapest, with offices in London, San Francisco and Boston.