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.