In 2022, we spent a lot of time developing new features to help you step up your game on mobile, including:
- Flare.Build: Bitrise acquired Flare.Build to enable developers to speed up feedback loops, iterate faster, and multiply app build performance by up to 10x with remote and advanced cache options.
- Build Pipeline: break your Workflows into Stages, build and test in parallel, shard your tests, and get faster feedback.
- M1 machines: accelerate your transition to Apple Silicon through our fully virtualized, scalable M1 compute options, and build and test faster than ever.
- Bitrise Insights: track your build and test performance so that you can stay on target and accelerate your build pipelines.
- New version of Deploy to Bitrise.io Step: storing artifacts has switched from AWS S3 to Google Cloud Storage, which means improvements in speed, especially for testing and deployment.
- Bitrise sample apps: you can now get started on Bitrise without the need to connect your own app.
- Workflow Recipes: ready-made solutions for common Workflow tasks. You can find a range of different Recipes along with examples of entire Workflows.
- New Verified Integration Steps: more Steps added in 2022 to give you more options to test and build mobile apps at scale such as Kobiton, Autify, ConfigCat, LambdaTest and Tuist.
Furthermore, we analyzed a lot of behavioral data and conducted user surveys to figure out how we could improve Bitrise to give mobile developers the best experience. The big picture of what we've found - as we do every year, is broken down into bite-size chunks and key stats to make it easier to understand.
Total build time of all active apps on Bitrise
During 2022, your builds were running on Bitrise for 5,271,451 hours, which is 601 years! (You know what happened 601 years ago? Henry VI was, and still is, the youngest person ever to succeed to the English throne at the age of nine months).
Platform distribution
Native platforms are still the biggest: iOS keeps its significant lead, this year it increased 1% from 2021. Interestingly though, the Android share decreased while it usually increases year-on-year, in 2021 it was 31% and in 2022 it dropped again to 28%.
As for cross-platforms: React Native beat Flutter with 4% and Ionic and Cordova almost share both numbers. MacOS also saw a small decline last year.
Xcode delivery and adoption
For the first time, Xcode 14.0 GA was announced at WWDC and adopted by developers all over the world. Since the GA announcement, Bitrise has delivered new Xcode versions within the 48-hour window and continues to add the latest version to ensure Apple developers always have the latest macOS and Xcode versions available.
Among these versions, Xcode 13.2.x was the most used stack in 2022.
Git hosting in the cloud
Since we started collecting data years ago, our users always had the most repos on GitHub. We saw this decrease though to 56% in 2019 and then even further in 2021 to 45%, but it’s now on the rise again with a score of 61% in 2022.
Bitbucket, the second major player continues to lose repos (and has done so since 2017) with a share of 16% whilst custom solutions, GitLab, and Self-hosted GitLab kept their old shares.
MODAS Survey
2022 saw the introduction of Bitrise’s MODAS: the Mobile DevOps Performance, Productivity, and Maturity Assessment survey designed to provide insight and actionable guidance for mobile product organizations of all sizes and industries to provide the mobile community with a comprehensive comparative analysis of modern mobile end-to-end DevOps practices.
With MODAS we learned how organizations excel and where they need to improve.
Here are a few insights we can glean from the answers:
1- The most common mobile development practices are automated crash reporting, unit testing, and modular app design and development.
2- Larger companies have more robust testing practices than smaller companies. They were more likely to do static security analysis, automated UI tests, use Espresso, and do code coverage analysis.
3- Developers of shopping apps used more in-app A/B testing whereas developers of finance apps have more robust testing practices and use feature flags more.
For more insights about our MODAS survey and results, we prepared two editions for Fintech and Shopping apps to give you an idea about the benchmarks and all the other statistics.
Testing
Testing is important, right? Our stats definitely prove that they are because we keep seeing a steady rise in the number of tests running through Bitrise each year. 💫
In 2022, our users ran 4,425,899 unit tests and 3,136,132 UI tests
Some Build Insights
I’ve already mentioned that in 2022, your builds ran for 5,271,451 hours on Bitrise. Let’s see some more interesting stats that might come in handy if you want to compare your build stats to others'. How do your builds compare?
- Average build time: 937 (15,6 minutes)
- Average success rate: 69%
Flaky tests are a real problem, but we now have a solution that will help users identify them by comparing historical test reports in Bitrise Insights.
You’ll also be able to check out how long certain Steps run, so let us give you the average run times for a couple of popular Steps:
- Xcode Archive & Export for iOS: 614.9 sec
- Android Build: 315.7 sec
- Xcode Test for iOS: 614.9 sec
- Android Unit Test: 194.04 sec
- Git Clone Repository: 40.2 sec
Additionally, we have revamped Insights based on customer feedback and to make way for new features. To celebrate this, we are giving away all Insights V2 features for free until the end of March 2023.
Read more about Bitrise Insights V2 from our blog post.
Our Steps and integrations in numbers 🌟
There are currently around 350+ Steps and integrations in the Bitrise ecosystem. Maintained by us, our partners, and the community, each of these Steps is responsible for a small task, ranging from running tests, archiving the app, deploying, releasing, or notifying team members. During a build, a series of Steps run in the order defined in a Workflow.
In 2022, our 350+ Steps ran a total of 237,090,923 times
The most used Step in our library
Like every year, our Script Step ran the most times in 2022 with over 68 million runs. This Step is used when someone needs to run a custom command or install/update a tool that is not (yet) available on our virtual machines. (This is also the Step that fails the most times, so we suggest using the official Steps if possible. Maintenance is also easier for Steps from the out-of-the-box ones.)
Apart from the usual suspects in the default workflows, we have two new steps making waves in 2022: Git Clone comes with over 18 million runs and Activate SSH Key with over 17 million. 🚀
Top build Steps
Like last year, Gradle Runner is still at the top, followed by Xcode Archive.
Top test Steps
This list is the same as last year. In regards to the 6th Step, Danger is a very useful Step in helping users avoid linting issues in their project's code. Have you tried it yet?
Top deploy Steps
When using Bitrise, you need to deploy your app and artifacts to be able to use them later, so it’s no surprise that Deploy to Bitrise.io is the top deploy Step. Firebase also kept its second place, but Deploy to App Store Connect - Application Loader (formerly iTunes Connect) beat Google Play Deploy this time.
The average deploy steps per user per week is 5.3 - this was 4.2 for 2021 and the total deploy Steps in 2022: were 18,532,914, an increase from 2021’s total of 17,346,965.
Top notification Steps
The top spots remained the same, with Slack’s whopping 6 million runs in 2022. Also, Microsoft Team overtook Telegram in 5th place.
Top utility Steps
Same as ever, the Script Step is still in first place with Git Clone coming in second and Cache Steps and fastlane coming in after that.
Our top Verified Steps
Our Verified Steps program kicked off in 2020 to offer official integrations in Bitrise, maintained by our partners. We’ve been rolling out new verified steps continuously, and our DMs are always open for partnership opportunities, so if you have an app that you would love to get verified, drop us a line here.
Other bits
Our team published 145 blog posts in 2022, which means more than 2 articles/week on average. That’s... a lot! Our readers’ favorite article was ‘Build and deploy a Flutter web app with Firebase and Bitrise’.
We hosted 11 webinars in total — the biggest favorite was the Now Secure Webinar. We sponsored 29 events to support mobile developer communities all around the world.
Additionally, We hosted our first ever Mobile DevOps Summit with more than 1300 attendees and 97 speakers worldwide. In case you missed it you can watch the top 5 sessions on-demand and the rest are available on our Mobile DevOps Summit YouTube playlist.
We’d love to hear your thoughts! 💜
We hope these insights are as interesting for you as they are for us. We love feedback, so tweet us or comment on our social pages if you have any suggestions, or if we missed anything you might be interested in! We're proud to help so many great people save countless hours and ensure code quality so they can spend more time on their ideas and their code.
Please share this article! For more, keep an eye out by following us on Twitter, or being a part of our Discuss Bitrise community. We also have a growing YouTube channel!
If you prefer Slack, go to chat.bitrise.io and join the conversation in these channels:
#ios
#flutter
#android
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Happy building in 2023! 🚀
