2018 was an awesome year for Bitrise. We kept on adding new features, enhancing what we already had and we grew a lot too. We couldn't have done this without your feedback and contribution, thank you for it! And now, let's see the details!

Bitrise 🤖

🙏 Early January we had to go 0 to 100 real quick: we spent most of the spring welcoming developers and companies migrating from Buddybuild to Bitrise. We do hope that all feel welcome on Bitrise.

🖼 The first two batches of the new Bitrise look arrived in 2018: the redesigned landing page in June and the dashboard in November. Stay tuned for the rest. I've already seen it and it looks super-duper cool, trust me.

💱 As for our pricing plans, we retired our Pro plan and introduced the Developer Plan instead for $10 less. And as a thank you for all your contributions, we now provide free developer plan features for Open Source projects on Bitrise.

🇯🇵 In November, Bitrise went to Tokyo for two very successful test nights (see all the Tweets here) and we've started localizing a significant part of our documentation to Japanese with our contributors' help. (Coming soon.)

📚 We're always very curious about how our users use Bitrise: what problems were solved with us and how. And they have some great stories to tell, for sure. This is why we launched our Customer Success Stories Center.

🏢 In addition to smaller teams and startups, we're offering our enterprise customers dedicated subscription plans with custom hosting, security and support features available.

🤖 As our team is growing rapidly and has doubled in a year to 40, we finally moved to our awesome brand new office. Have you seen our Instagram profile? Check out our team and office. Hey, we're still hiring, come and join us!

New features highlights

We rolled out an impressive number of new features, so I've picked the most interesting ones.

For all platforms

🔀 Per-workflow stack selection: Choosing a different stack for a workflow from what you set for the app will give you some handy new tools.

🏺 Pass Artifacts between builds with Build Cache: It is possible to pass artifacts between builds using Cache:Push and Cache:Pull steps, which is super handy if you want to use a file generated by one build in another.

🔒 We had a bunch of security enhancements:

• we introduced protected secrets,
• we added sensitive inputs,
• increased account security,
• and you can set the expiry of API tokens.

🔫 Start multiple builds with the same trigger - The more apps you have the more time-saving methods you need, we know that. Check out our two steps used for scaling builds by running builds parallel on multiple concurrencies.

↕ Download or upload the bitrise.yml of your app with Bitrise API - You can download the current bitrise.yml using our Bitrise API and you can upload a yml too.

🗿 Build parts of your mono repo separately - Handle the parts of your monolithic GitHub repository separately and only build the app that has been changed.

👤 Add awesome avatars for profiles and organizations - You requested it, we delivered: add a profile pic for yourself or your organizations on Bitrise. Plus you can upload a custom icon for your app on Bitrise too. Yay! 🎉

🦊 Introducing GitLab self-hosted support for Organizations - With easier setup and the same functionalities as for hosted solutions: we support self-hosted GitLab instances for Organizations.

📜 Try the new, smarter YML editor on Bitrise.io - We are happy to introduce a new YML editor with lots of new features.

iOS

📝 iOS Auto Provision supports projects using Xcode's Automatically manage signing option - Use Xcode's Automatically manage signing and Bitrise's iOS Auto Provision step together!

✍ Upload your iOS code signing files automatically - We rolled out an update for Codesigndoc that you'll surely appreciate if you use it: we've added an option for uploading provisioning profiles and certificates. Or you can upload and handle your code signing files through Bitrise API: you can upload your build certificate and provisioning files to Bitrise.

🎉 Introducing solid and snappy real device testing for iOS with Firebase (beta) - Get conclusive test results presented in logs, video, and screenshots on Bitrise for your iOS apps too with Google Firebase. A year ago we introduced real device testing for Android and you loved it, so you can now try it for iOS as well.

Android

🤖 Redesigned Android scanner, steps, and workflows to make it simpler and better - We love redesign, you know, right? 😍 Quite a few things were changed for the more convenient for our Android users. Check out how we made the Android setup smarter, what new steps replace the old Gradle Runner step and how the new default workflows look.

♻ Convert old Android workflows and configure new steps based on the old Gradle tasks - We introduced new steps for Android and redesigned workflows for the new apps added to Bitrise. Sounds interesting but you have a well-established Android app nested comfortably into Bitrise? Cool. Let us help you convert to the new one!

Other

🎈 Introducing Auto Provisioning for Cordova and Ionic projects - Both Cordova and Ionic projects' prepare and build phases can be separated now, so you'll be able to use the iOS Auto Provision step with these project types too.

New step highlights 👣

What about steps and integrations? We have a lot of them. By a lot, I mean 218. There were 52 new steps added in 2018. 🎉

These are the most notable steps from 2018:

• GitLab status
• Create ZIP
• Appetize
• GitHub Release
• the 3 new Android steps (see above)
• Xcode build for simulator
• React Native Expo Eject
• Deploygate
• Chuck Norris
• Decrypt file

Talking to you :)

Our team had a busy time supporting our users: they had about 15K new conversations and 93% of these conversations received good or excellent ratings. The tickets had a 4-day median close time, after introducing a regular follow-up.

Our Discuss site continued to be one of the most popular places for our community to share their knowledge and to use as an open forum for discussion. 1.3K new topics were opened with 4.7K posts and they received 1.8K likes. For your questions asked, we accepted 308 solutions. Did you know you can submit (and vote for) feature requests on Discuss? Last year, 167 feature requests were submitted.

And last but not least, we published 113 blog posts in 2018. I hope that you found some interesting reads on our blog. We're glad that you are here in 2019 too! 👋