It’s a long tradition at Bitrise that we compile the biggest learnings from the previous year in our annual State of App Development blog post.
We made some predictions last year and asked our followers on Twitter to guess if we were right. Here’s the thread if you want to play before reading 🪁
In 2020, your builds ran for 5,232,196 hours or 597 years. That is also roughly the amount of time that has passed since the 12th birthday of Joan of Arc.
No-contact Xcode delivery
One of our biggest commitments for 2020 was to deliver the new Xcode versions to our users in under 48 hours. Although at times we had our work cut out for us, we were able to deliver each new Xcode version to our users in under 24 hours. 🎉
Adoption rate of new Xcode versions on Bitrise — 2020
Mobile Platforms
Apps built on Bitrise, by platform — 2020
While iOS apps gained a significant lead over Android apps over the years, in 2020, native platforms still remain triumphant. Cross-platform apps are on the rise, but they have quite a long way to go before they can catch up to the reigning champions.
React Native and Flutter were the third and fourth most popular platforms in Bitrise this time as well. One of our predictions last year was that Flutter would surpass React Native by the end of 2020 based on the massive growth we saw in the previous year.
"If Flutter continues this growth trajectory over 2020, by Q4 of this year, Flutter projects will outnumber React Native ones on Bitrise." — us, sometime in 2020
Well, turns out our crystal ball has a few bugs 🔮
Our Steps and integrations in numbers 🌟
There are currently around 320+ 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. These can range from running tests, archiving the app, deploying, releasing, or notifying team members, among others. Let’s see the fan favorites!
Top Build Steps
Most popular Build Steps on Bitrise — 2020
The four most used build Steps stayed the same, but the Flutter Build Step took the fifth spot by storm. The competition between Flutter Build and Xamarin Archive was tight last year, but it was a no-brainer this time. In 2021, Flutter is very likely to overtake Android Build for UI Testing.
Top TEST Steps
Most popular Test Steps on Bitrise — 2020
The first four spots on this list remain unchanged, but the fifth spot was taken by Virtual Device Testing for Android, overtaking Codecov. And a fun fact: every single Step in this list was used over three times more often in 2020 than the year before.
Top Deploy Steps
Most popular Deploy Steps on Bitrise — 2020
The biggest climb was achieved by the Firebase App Distribution Step, jumping right up to #2 from last year’s 11th spot. The fifth spot was taken by another newcomer, Appcenter App release, up from number 8.
Top Notification Steps
Most popular Notification Steps on Bitrise — 2020
While the top spots remain unchanged, the competition for the fifth spot was tight with Telegram Notifer emerging victorious by the 31st of December. Mailgun is an honorable mention on the sixth spot with only a few hundred spins behind.
Top Utility Steps
Most popular Utility Steps on Bitrise — 2020
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it — the ranking between top Utility Steps remained exactly the same, however, each Step was used over 3 times more often this past year. Thank you for that!
The first Verified Steps make a grand entrance
We launched our Verified Step program last year to offer official integrations in Bitrise, maintained by our partners. Over the year, these Steps were used almost half a million times, but we are not stopping there! 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.
Most popular Verified Steps on Bitrise — 2020
The three most used Verified Steps last year were developed by the teams at Codecov, DeployGate, and Applivery. Built to help developers with code coverage reports, distributing apps to testers, and managing devices respectively, these Steps are available to all Bitrise users, so head to your dashboard if you want to give them a spin. We definitely recommend checking them out!
You can already check out the first Verified Step of 2021: Huawei joined our partners last week, releasing their first official AppGallery integration to date. This is a major milestone for Huawei and developers alike — their new operating system, HarmonyOS, is expected to be installed on 200 million devices by the end of the year, providing Bitrise users with a vast uncharted territory.
Thank you
This time last year, we had a long list of events we wanted to host and attend, but instead, we found a way to connect with our community across the globe. We hosted eight Bitrise User Group events in English and Japanese, more webinars and live events than we can count, and launched our Experts Program.
And the story goes on: over the year, the amazing teams at TransferWise, Epam, Homeis, DroidsOnRoids, Dovetail, Hatena, Recochoku, DeNA shared their story behind choosing Bitrise as their CI/CD platform. We were even joined by Tonal and Signify, and hosted the Scaling with Flutter webinar a few months back.
While 2020 may have been the longest and shortest year of all, it was filled with moments that brought joy to our lives as we navigated our way through it with the team.
Looking forward to what 2021 will bring our way.
From the bottom of our hearts: thank you ❤️
