Kicking off our Ask Me Anything series, Bitrise Sales Engineers Damien Murphy and Tamas Bazsonyi answered questions about new features, roadmap plans, and shared some of the tricks&tips on using Bitrise like a natural.
Here’s a short recap on the questions and answers — you can watch the full recording on our YouTube channel.
1:33 Can we expect to have first-class support to privately shared Bitrise Steps?
Tamas: You can add private Steps via the bitrise.yml — we just came out with a new update that lets you manage and store your bitrise.yml file in your app’s repository while retaining the option to edit the Workflow in the UI. 🚀
4:32 Do you have plans to provide a Dashboard for app metrics?
Damien: Yes, we do have an exciting insights add-on in the works, so stay tuned! In the meantime, the Bitrise API has raw build data you can connect to a Grafana dashboard.
15:55 Can we expect to have start-build/wait-for-build steps in a more friendly way to use?
Damien: There’s a lot going around this topic right now, we already added some really awesome features to both Steps (Fail Fast, Save Build Artifacts, and Parameterized Build Env Vars). There is a new feature coming soon: pipeline management will make it a lot easier to visualize our process.
20:41 How can I log in multiple App IDs for a single app in Bitrise?
Tamás: Apple released more than 200 new App Store Connect APIs at WWDC 2020. Our teams are continuously working on integrating these APIs into Bitrise and enabling our users to use the default Apple-provided APIs to handle anything that is App Store Connect related. For now, Fastlane Match is the best approach for white-label apps, but there are a couple of other solutions as well.
24:22 What are some advantages of Bitrise compared to GitHub Action?
Damien: One of the big selling points of Bitrise is that we are mobile-focused, built by mobile developers for mobile developers. If you need access to Xcode betas for testing, then you gonna need the latest version as soon as it comes out. We get those betas to you within 48 hours of the release — be it the holidays or the weekend, we make sure you can test on the latest software available. And also, we have a wide variety (over 300!) of custom Steps and integrations, all mobile-focused. What you get is a very focused platform for mobile that is easy to get up and running.
25:57 Can we use our in-house dependency management system?
Tamás: Yes, you can! There are actually a couple of possible solutions here. For example, for Android builds, you can cache Gradle dependencies by using the Bitrise cache. We saw in the past that when there are some kind of issues with the internet depositories where android dependencies would be stored having the cache and having the dependencies basically cached there can make sure that you don't see any kind of build failures due to an outage on any other dependency hosting solution.
27:59 Is there a way or plan to allow us to update all instances of a Step?
Damien: This is actually one of the core features of Bitrise. Whenever you change the step.yml in your repository, it will propagate to all other workflows and apps that use it automatically. (watch from 27:59 to see the full answer demonstrated on Damien’s screen)
31:29 Any chance in the future that Bitrise will be able to integrate with Gradle Enterprise?
Tamas: We are looking into possible ways to speed up Android builds and what would be the most efficient way to do that. We don't really have an ETA on this, but our teams are investigating any kind of integration with Gradle Enterprise, especially in regards to caching. We are definitely keeping an eye out on this!
37:31 Can we upload and run custom jar executables on Bitrise?
Tamas: Java is pre-installed on Bitrise, so you are able to also run any kind of java executables that you would like. All you need to do is follow the same methods that you are also using when you are running a Java application on your own machine from a Java file.
Make sure to join our AMA webinars in the future, where you will be able to ask all the questions that keep you up at night about Bitrise and mobile development. Follow us on Twitter to stay informed about our upcoming online events!
We ❤️ our user's ideas!
If you have a feature idea that you would love to see in Bitrise, reach out to us! Our team always looks at the requests we receive from our users. After all, we love building a product you enjoy.
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