,
8 tweets,
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1/ Compared to web, mobile CI/CD has been in the dark ages. Waiting 15+ minutes for builds, testing PRs hard, and complex app-store submission. But the amazing team of @sanderlijbrink @pepibumur @markrcote @Alexrs95 fixed this for @ShopifyEng. Let me share the story...
2/ Like for web apps, each mobile commit has its own dedicated @buildkite build and to speed up CI build artifacts are shared between parallel testing steps. This takes developer machines and gives us fast and reproducible environments. More later on what this enables. 
3/ iOS automation can be particularly tricky. Using a cluster of Mac minis in MacStadium and Anka virtualization, we provide disposable macOS environments to build our iOS apps in a fast and reproducible way. Read more in engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineer…
4/ With a single cmd you can launch any build of an app for a repo, branch, or PR in a local simulator. Our cmd tool “dev” will fetch the binary directly from Buildkite. This saves developers 30+ minutes each review and helps designers try out changes earlier in the dev cycle.
5/ All apps are released using github.com/Shopify/shipit… with a new Mobile fork we will share later. A single button click will a release branch cut from master and compile for release. Another button uploads the app to a chosen channel, such as the Google Play Store.
6/ Mobile teams get notified on Slack about changes to the release state to ensure the whole team stays informed. This is important culturally because it helps the team have a shared "healthy" quality goal and jump on problems early.
7/ We have recently been able to move to a weekly release cadence something that was not possible with our previous processes and tools.
8/ With ~100 full-time mobile developers, 380 builds/day across mobile apps we napkin calculated that this tooling is saving our dev team 82 hours/day in messing with dev environments and running tests locally. This amazing team is 👂🏼 to this thread and waiting to take questions.
