2021 was different: full of challenges yet full of potential. As we’re getting closer to its end, it’s time to look back at those moments in the year when we pushed the needle forward serving the mobile community and helping teams achieve mobile product success. Bitrise kept expanding rapidly: we had more resources to improve our product to meet the ever-evolving needs of mobile teams and to focus on producing more content helping mobile teams work more efficiently and effectively.
Let’s wrap up the year and see what happened over the past 12 months! 👏
Product milestones in 2021 🏆
Accelerated speed and performance
We understand the need for speed underpinning the mobile development and deployment process. With the introduction of the next generation Bitrise Build Infrastructure, Gen2 in June, we got closer to our vision of speed than ever: it provides improved performance, stability, and security. As a result, builds are faster, our users have to spend less time waiting, and teams get more done. A few months later, we also increased the performance of our Linux build environments. We started to use stronger Linux machines, switched to a newer CPU architecture, and increased the memory available. We also made remarkable improvements to the website, including improving the load time of the log by more than 60% so you can find what you need or get in touch faster. 🚀
We didn’t run out of great news here: we’re in the final stages of a private beta introducing M1 compute options on Bitrise (with general availability expected in Q1 of 2022). Compared to the current fastest macOS option, Elite XL, M1 will offer up to 31% faster builds for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV projects. Want to take it for a spin? Sign up for updates.
Features to make your life easier
As we shape our product according to the needs of mobile teams, we never stop building new features, introducing iterations, and making smaller tweaks. These are always based on how our users actually use the product, making sure they have the best experience possible.
- Build Insights
In order to answer the many, many feature requests asking for insights on how to optimize your build performance, we introduced Build Insights. It is a mobile-focused, out-of-the-box solution that tracks your build times, Workflow performance, and more.
- Improving your day-to-day work
The Secret Envs filtering feature lets you manage secrets in a central location. Managing team members and apps also became a lot easier with our new team management setup, Workspaces. The new Xcode 13 test repetition options allow you to run your tests repeatedly and set up other additional options. And finally, the new 'Abort/Rebuild' buttons located on the build list were also huge fan favorites! These kinds of small wins make our platform more flexible, easy to use — and your reactions like these ones keep us going! 💫
- Verified Steps
If you kept an eye on our updates, you probably noticed that we continued to introduce new Verified Steps throughout the entire year: the testing-focused Sofy.ai, pCloudy, Appaloosa, and Mussel, the security-focused DexProtector, AppRay, Oversecured, and Data Theorem are all part of our official Verified Partners program, and you can find all of their Steps in our Step Library. We encourage you to use them to optimize your testing processes and to secure your applications. Finally, we were delighted to partner up with Huawei as the first CI/CD solution to integrate with AppGallery: now you can automatically deploy your app to the AppGallery from Bitrise, and get detailed reports directly from AppGallery Connect.
What made us proud ✨
This year — despite the big changes coming with becoming a remote-first company — was an outstanding success for our team. As teamwork makes the dream work, we weren’t short of proud moments!
- As we are passionate about writing educational pieces on mobile development and DevOps, we decided to redesign and revamp our entire blog: now it’s a lot prettier and user-friendly. You all seemed to like the changes!
- In July, we announced the opening of a new branch in Japan (which wasn’t that surprising if you are familiar with our approach to the Japanese mobile dev community since the very beginning 😌) and started hiring there locally.
- A month and a thorough audit process later, we became SOC2 compliant, validating our compliance with the highest industry standards possible and our commitment to the security of our users' data.
- Workhuman put us under a microscope in 9 categories, and as we completed the challenge successfully, Bitrise is now Workhuman Certified! We’re officially a great place to work, and you can join us on this journey if you’re interested. 👀
- In November, our team had a good reason to celebrate: we’ve raised $60M Series C funding led by Insight Venture Partners, one of the world’s top venture capital firms! 🎉 This funding will help us to build out our team and technology to make mobile teams even faster, more efficient, and more successful on mobile.
Topics and events that kept us abuzz 👀
Since WWDC and Google I/O are among the top dev conferences people can’t stop talking about, we decided to take them to the next level. For WWDC 2021, we created an awesome video series about the expectations of iOS experts. After the event, we hosted a recap discussion and had a great chat about Apple’s announcements hosted by Vincent Pradeilles. During Google I/O, our Dev Advocate, Moataz Nabil checked in with daily vlogs to recap all the happenings. Wow, these were some fun times! ✨
As we are big fans of the Building Mobile Apps at Scale: 39 Engineering Challenges ebook written by Gergely Orosz, we created our own special edition and made it free to download on our website. In November, we invited Gergely for an amazing live discussion too: our experts shared the best practices they used to scale apps like Uber or SIXT.
We also explored mobile shopping apps, and deep-dived into their unique features to give a helping hand for those who work in e-commerce. We published multiple blog articles, launched a report, and hosted a webinar with mobile shopping gurus from companies like Mercado Libre and Shopify.
So much excitement, so little time… so let’s see some numbers instead:
- We published more than 160 blog posts
- Recorded 5 new episodes of our Mobile DevOps is a Thing! podcast
- Organized 11 webinars covering a wide range of topics
- Uploaded 91 new videos to Youtube (and reached our first K subscribers!)
- We sponsored and attended 15 mobile events and conferences
It was clearly a busy year, but now it’s time to slow down a little and recharge those batteries: we are planning to achieve even more in 2022 and keep supporting mobile teams all over the world. What would you like to see from us next year? Which feature update made you the happiest in 2021? Let us know on Twitter! 💬
