Embrace and Bitrise's webinar connects release and production processes for mobile developers, creating faster releases and flawless user experiences.
As mobile developers, our core goals are to build high-quality apps efficiently, ensure seamless user experiences, and quickly address any issues that arise once in production. A recent webinar from Bitrise and Embrace offers valuable strategies to achieve these goals through optimized CI/CD and robust observability.
Optimizing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines is crucial for developer productivity and faster release cycles. Bitrise offers powerful tools and infrastructure to make your builds go faster.
One key area that all developers can find improvement is leveraging **efficient workflows**. In the webinar, Naveen Nazimudeen, Solutions Architect at Bitrise, shows how points to the significant potential for savings. He shows how even a 20-minute improvement per build, with an average of 50 builds per day, leads to substantial productivity gains and cost savings annually.
Key strategies for faster CI/CD workflows discussed include:
Bitrise also integrates agentic AI steps into workflows. Examples include an AI code reviewer that posts comments on repositories and an AI issue debugger that analyzes logs and source code to identify and suggest solutions for workflow failures. In the future, a “fix it” button could even attempt to resolve issues, run tests, and create pull requests automatically.
Once your app is in production, the focus shifts to the user experience. This is where mobile observability with Embrace becomes critical.
The goal of observability, according to David Rifkin, Developer Relations Engineer at Embrace, is to proactively understand how users interact with your app and identify issues before they escalate. This gives your team a fuller picture of app reliability, and lets you move beyond reactive feedback like App Store reviews or user complaints.
Observability on mobile means moving beyond crash reporting. While crashes are important, a stack trace doesn’t tell you if a UI locked up due to a slow API response or if network conditions changed. Issues are experienced at the user level, not just the code level. Embrace aims to capture all details of a user’s session – good and bad – to provide a complete picture.
Key aspects of Embrace’s approach to observability include:
The power of Bitrise and Embrace is amplified when they are used together, creating a more reliable and automated release process. The integration allows for a seamless feedback loop between development and production.
A compelling use case involves using Embrace to observe a phased app release via Bitrise’s release management feature. After the release begins to a small subset of users, production data immediately starts flowing into Embrace. Developers can then monitor for any regressions or spikes in issues in this new version.
If a predefined threshold for an issue, such as a failed transaction rate or crash rate, is hit, Embrace can trigger an alert. This alert, instead of merely notifying an on-call engineer, can be configured to make an API call directly to the Bitrise API. This call can then initiate a “pause release” workflow within Bitrise, automatically halting the phased rollout of the problematic version.
This automated process effectively manages crash situations, allowing for paused releases and quick remediation before it causes issues for the entire userbase. This integration empowers mobile developers to maintain high velocity and ensure app reliability from the CI/CD pipeline through to live production, fostering a proactive approach to issue resolution and continuous improvement.
Deliver incredible mobile experiences with Embrace.
Get started today with 1 million free user sessions.
Get started free
