Going into the new year, we had several exciting things in the works: expanding our office space, growing the team, attending and hosting events, and releasing a ton of new features for our users.
We had to scratch most of those plans as we closed our offices in March, and canceled the traveling plans, but thankfully, one thing didn't change: our shared dedication to help our users build better mobile apps.
Now, as the Holiday season is just around the corner, we decided to take a trip down memory lane and collect what has changed in Bitrise since Last Christmas. 🎄
This is how we were coping this year, enjoy!
COVID-19 aid
As companies started to shift to remote working, we wanted to find a way to help the development community on a larger scale. Many teams, from smaller businesses to freelance developers, and indies suddenly found themselves without access to their local build hardware.
Free remote app building
In April, we bumped up the build timeout from 10 to 30 minutes on the Hobby plan and increased the monthly build limit from 30 to 200.
With this, every Bitrise user has 6,000 free build minutes per month.
The Hobby plan provides access to 300+ configurable Steps and integrations, the ability to insert custom code, support for all Git services, and add-ons like Ship and Test reporting.
Free resources for nonprofits
We wanted to support nonprofit organizations and acknowledge the importance of the role they play right now globally.
For every nonprofit on Bitrise, we provide 3 complimentary Org Standard concurrencies for a year. Additionally, organizations that are directly involved in COVID-19 relief and related activities are eligible for additional free resources.
Reach out to our Support team, if you haven’t already, and they’ll add these resources to your Bitrise account.
Manage and store bitrise.yml in Git
Due to p̶e̶e̶r̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶s̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ popular demand, the team made the dreams of many come true and added an option to pull the bitrise.yml file from the project source code.
Since this update rolled out, Bitrise users were able to review changes, roll back to previous versions, give Workflow editing rights to an increased amount of people, and (reportedly) sleep better!
Many would say this is how it was always meant to be ❤️
Mobile monitoring with Trace (beta)
Bitrise is a mobile-first platform — as an organization, we always look for ways to improve the lives of mobile developers and to help them build better apps.
When it comes to application performance monitoring, we found that while there are several solutions on the market, they don't satisfy the outcome-based approach of mobile developers.
With Trace, we tried to build a tool that properly tackles the three critical areas of monitoring: detecting the problem, assessing the impact, and tracing the cause.
We are currently in beta testing for Trace, but luckily for you, we are looking for testers. Sign up here if you are interested in shaping the future of Trace before the official launch!
Kick-starting the Verified Steps program
In June, we welcomed Genymotion as the first app to partner up with us in our Verified Step program. Since then several cool Steps were added to Bitrise thanks to the teams behind Applivery, PagerDuty, DeployGate, CodeCov, Waldo, and most recently, DeviceFarmer.
Bitrise Verified Steps are maintained by Open Source teams, who guarantee a consistent, and high-quality performance for every user.
If you happen to look for them in the app, no worries, they are super easy to spot! Look for a blue checkmark like this one.
Xcode updates in Bitrise
We delivered on our promise to release the newest Xcode version to Bitrise within 48 hours this year as well.
Most notably, after the September Apple event, when we were all pleasantly surprised by the iOS 14 release. Fortunately, we were able to release the Xcode stack on Bitrise in less than 19 hours.
We understand how time-sensitive mobile development is and will prioritize speed, and most of all, our users in the future as well.
Want to see more?
We are already prepping for the upcoming year and have some exciting changes in store. Take our survey and let us know how you want Pipeline Management to look like on Bitrise in 2021!
Wishing you a joyful holiday season and see you all on the Bitrise Dashboard next year! 🚀
