This is an interview with one of the sponsors, Bitrise.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your company and what you do?
A: Bitrise is a Mobile DevOps platform, featuring fully hosted CI/CD for mobile and countless ways to automate mobile development and release processes.

Q: What are your key objectives and goals?
A: We want to help mobile product organizations – so the engineers, but also QA, DevOps, release managers, and more – release with confidence more often and maximize the impact they generate through their apps

Q: What does your company bring to the app development market? What is your USP?
A: We’re the world’s only Mobile DevOps platform and have been built from the ground up to make mobile teams’ lives easier. That means we’re first out the gate with access to the latest Xcode versions and fully virtualized Apple Silicon environments, but also that we continuously work on expanding our library of integrations with third-party services.

Q: What can app developers gain by working with or choosing your company?
A: From a very practical point of view, they’ll simply stop wasting a lot of time trying to set up and maintain mobile build infrastructure. We’ve seen this save hours per developer per week in some cases. Beyond that, when teams utilize Bitrise to automate and streamline more of their processes, we see app release frequency and quality go up, which has led to a measurable improvement in in-app engagement for many customers.

Q: What achievement are you most proud of and why?
A: As a company, we provide free resources to NGOs and open source projects. Recently, at our annual retreat, we all looked at some of those NGOs and the impact we’d generated there. It was amazing to see the improvement in quality and engagement for apps that do important work like matching veterans to mental health providers, collecting donations to feed the hungry, and more.

Q: Why did you become a sponsor for Appdevcon/Appril?
A: We’re a company founded by app developers for app developers and have tried to “pay it forward” by sponsoring as many app development meetups, conferences, podcasts, and websites as we can. It’s also how we keep our finger on the pulse of what developers care about.

Q: What are you hoping to get out of sponsoring Appdevcon/Appril?
A: We hope to talk to as many developers as possible, learn about the bottlenecks they experience in their processes, how they collaborate with others in their mobile product organization, and generally how we can make their lives easier.

Q: Why should participants come to your stand?
A: Beyond — arguably — the best swag in the business, visitors can take a live MODAS survey which is a global effort to benchmark mobile engineering practices and processes, already filled in by over 2,000 teams worldwide. We’ll also have multiple Bitrise and Mobile DevOps experts at hand to talk shop.

Q: Which important trends and challenges do you see in app development for the next two years?
A: In a lot of places, teams are getting bigger and more complex as companies become more aware of the massive impact apps have on their business. It seems likely that more companies and tools will pop up to help manage those complexities, and help mobile product organizations work together more effectively. Cross-platform seems like an area with a lot of potential, with Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform following the example set by Xamarin and React Native. From our end, we see both continuously gaining interest and adoption among our userbase.

Super Apps: Businesses are shifting away from single-purpose apps and toward one-stop solutions that solve multiple problems.

Mobile e-commerce: Following the COVID pandemic, we saw a significant shift in lifestyle. Everyone, from large retailers to small businesses and individual consumers, has begun to rely on mobile apps.

Food and Grocery Delivery Apps: People began to rely heavily on apps. Mobile Entertainment & Gaming: Entertainment and gaming apps have become an integral part of everyday life. Some people cannot bear the thought of going a single day without them.

Mobile App Security: One of the top mobile app development trends is digital security. AI & Machine Learning: AI and machine learning have been among the top mobile app development trends for several years in a row.

AR & VR: Google Maps now includes a feature called “Live View,” which allows users to see the direction in real-time on real-world imagery.

Mobile Learning: It makes learning more convenient. Learners are empowered because they can learn from anyone and anywhere.

Challenges:

• Choosing the right development platform and tools.
• Performance and security issues.
• Screen size and device compatibility.
• Adopting a failed architecture pattern.
• UI testing for folding phones.

Q: What advice would you give to app developers?
A: Take a step back and consider the end-to-end process. The better you understand how and where you contribute to the bigger picture of bringing an app to market, the better you’ll be able to prioritize your time and collaborate with your peers across the mobile product organization. Inevitably, this will lead to better results and better relationships.

Find out what challenges your team faces and find appropriate solutions. You should spend less time on tasks that slow down developers and more time on code that matters. Be aware of the current trends in mobile development.

Make sure your app runs on the right platform.
Test your app more often and optimize it.
Distribute the necessary updates.
Engage with your customers and read their reviews.
Keep in mind that it’s a journey, not a destination, and be sure to take advantage of it.