Elli boosts mobile build speed by 89% with Bitrise to drive Europe’s electric future
Elli boosts mobile build speed by 89% with Bitrise to drive Europe’s electric future
Summary
Elli, as Volkswagen Group’s charging and energy brand, develops digital products and services to make electric mobility easier and more accessible across Europe. Elli’s mobile apps provide consumers and businesses with a range of energy and charging services that are central to achieving this mission. Prior to Bitrise, the company’s shared legacy infrastructure was causing build delays, instability, and heavy maintenance for its mobile team. By switching to Bitrise for mobile CI/CD, Elli has improved build times, increased developer productivity, and reduced infrastructure overhead, enabling the team to innovate faster and drive the energy transition forward.
Challenge
Founded in 2018 under the Volkswagen Group, Elli is focused on delivering charging and energy solutions to the Group’s brands and beyond. In addition to home and public charging solutions, Elli has also expanded to provide smart energy solutions — vital to the future of mobility and electric efficiency.
Elli’s mobile apps are vital to this transition, enabling customers to charge across its vast European network and manage smart home charging through integration with its own hardware.
“We have one main app that brings all EV and energy solutions into one place, with multiple teams contributing to it. We also run a smaller app for Volkswagen brand users, designed as a companion to the core Volkswagen app. So, for example, if you have a Volkswagen car you could use Elli’s smart charging app alongside it.”
Ganesh Bala Subramanian, Engineering Team Lead, Elli
Elli uses Azure DevOps as an all-in-one tool for project management, code hosting, and infrastructure. However, relying on it for mobile CI/CD created major challenges, including:
- Dependency on shared hardware leading to slow builds
- Outdated software holding back progress
- Limited control over its mobile build environment
Elli’s goal was to keep Azure DevOps pipelines, which were well integrated into its ecosystem, but find a way to run them on its own hardware. This led to experiments with Google Cloud VMs and Docker for Android, as well as operating three Mac Minis in the office for iOS. However, none of these options proved sustainable.
The team also explored cloud-hosted hardware solutions, but realised this option would introduce significant overhead, requiring them to maintain and troubleshoot machines on their own.
Ultimately, Elli's existing setup distracted the team from focusing on its top priority, building compelling app experiences. After 18 months of struggling with their fragmented setup, the team needed to find a solution that would allow them to spend less time focusing on infrastructure and maintenance and more time innovating for the future, “we reached a critical point where we said, okay, we’ve tried everything to do this ourselves, but it hasn’t worked, it was time to find a new CI/CD solution,” shared Ganesh.
“The biggest challenge of our setup pre-Bitrise was maintenance and keeping everything up to date. On top of that, having to context switch continuously from mobile development to troubleshooting a failed build was not sustainable. With nearly 20 developers sharing three Mac Minis meant builds were very slow. It wasn't a simple fix of adding 10 more Mac Minis. We needed a solution that could scale smoothly without adding too much overhead."
Ganesh Bala Subramanian, Engineering Team Lead, Elli
Solution
In their search for a new solution, Elli’s mobile team explored several options, including CircleCI, BuddyBuild, CodeMagic, and Bitrise. Having achieved success with Bitrise at previous companies, the team felt confident it would meet their needs. But one factor ultimately made Bitrise the clear choice:
“One crucial requirement we had was finding a way to integrate Azure DevOps into our mobile workflows. Bitrise was the only company willing to collaborate with us to make it happen, and that really set them apart for us. The team took an open-source plugin we found, modified it, and used it to connect our workflows with Azure.This was all in the proof of concept phase. I was super impressed by how fast it all came together, and the way Bitrise handled it made our decision to go with them easy.”
Ganesh Bala Subramanian, Engineering Team Lead, Elli
To prevent issues migrating pipelines from Azure to Bitrise, Elli used Fastlane as an intermediary for pipeline management. This allowed them to make the transition smoothly and ensure there was no disruption to their existing setup.
“About 70–80% of our builds run on Fastlane, so we were able to get things moving before we had access to Bitrise, then it was just a matter of adding a Fastlane step in Bitrise and most of the migration was done and we were ready to go.”
Onboarding was smooth with Bitrise's solutions engineers providing resources and hands-on guidance throughout the process to ensure Elli's mobile team could get up and running fast.
“Having access to Bitrise solutions engineers who could guide us through onboarding simplified the whole process. The team couldn’t have done more to help. We had direct access to engineers through a dedicated Slack channel, plus detailed walkthroughs for the whole team on using Bitrise for insights, troubleshooting, and optimizing our build process which was really helpful.”
Ganesh Bala Subramanian, Engineering Team Lead, Elli
Results
- Maintenance-free solution from day one“The first thing we noticed moving to Bitrise was we didn’t need to think about maintenance anymore or deal with a legacy setup that didn’t fit our needs. It’s super easy to use whether you are a junior or senior developer. You just go into the UI, set everything up, and in a few clicks, you’re good to go. It empowered our developers to move fast and achieve more, and the impact was instant,” shared Ganesh.
- 89% faster build cyclesOne of the first benefits Elli noticed after switching to Bitrise was the dramatic improvement in build speed. Build times dropped from up to 90 minutes (due to shared infrastructure dependency) to around 10 minutes on average, increasing developer velocity significantly.
“Before Bitrise, we couldn't capitalize on our mobile builds. We relied on shared infrastructure which meant peak-hour builds were extremely painful, especially waiting on tests to complete. With Bitrise, our iOS builds dropped from 90 minutes to 10. Everyone noticed the difference immediately.” - 2 days per month reclaimed for developersElli’’s mobile developers have been able to reclaim up to 2 days per month, previously lost to DevOps troubleshooting and maintenance, allowing them to shift focus from DevOps to developing user stories and providing more value to customers.
“With Bitrise, CI/CD just works. You push a change, it builds, you ship it to users. Done. As a developer, that’s all you care about. Not having to think about the setup is the best compliment we could give a platform, and that’s what we have with Bitrise. It’s been a huge win for the whole team,” shared Ganesh. - Stable, reliable builds, no more surprisesPreviously, iOS builds relied on physical Mac Minis in the office which were vulnerable to outages and unplanned issues. Entire sprints (approx. 2 weeks) were sometimes lost to unexpected complications or manual errors.
“It was difficult for us to maintain stability before Bitrise. Things were always up and down. We could spend an entire sprint just fixing build issues, then things might run smoothly for a few months. Then out of the blue, it could happen again. Even something as simple as someone switching off a Mac Mini could cause serious issues. We never knew what was coming next, or how to plan ahead.” - Real insights drive continuous improvementBitrise Insights feature allows the Elli team to see exactly what is going on in the build environment and pinpoint issues to reduce troubleshooting and improve build speed and efficiency.
“With Bitrise Insights, we can spot exactly when code changes impact performance. For example, when we were modularizing our app, some approaches could have negatively affected build time. For example, if a module depended on 10 or 20 others, build times could jump 5-10 minutes. With Insights, we could see exactly what caused an increase and fix it," shared Ganesh. - Rapid Xcode updates prevent delaysElli’s mobile team no longer has to stress about keeping pace with Xcode or Gradle updates, Bitrise handles it all automatically, reducing the risk of downtime and delivery delays.
“I really appreciate how quick Bitrise is at keeping everything up to date — Xcode, Gradle, all of it. It’s brilliant. Coming from our previous setup, where we had to do it all ourselves, you realise what a pain it is to keep everything working.” - Smarter spend, higher returnsPrevious solutions, like running virtual machines on Google Cloud, required constant configuration and manual optimization to avoid expensive 24/7 uptime costs. With spend now more predictable, the team can plan ahead with confidence.
“Previous solutions required heavy configuration to work with our Azure DevOps pipelines. Costs were unpredictable, and every month we had to explain overruns and try to figure out how to optimize our setup. It was a constant battle. Bitrise has taken all of the uncertainty away,” shared Ganesh.
The future
“The current car market is super competitive, so we are under constant pressure to innovate and stay ahead. With Bitrise we don’t have to think about DevOps, it 100 percent helps the team focus on what matters most and where we can bring more value to customers.”
Ganesh Bala Subramanian, Engineering Team Lead, Elli
Looking ahead, Elli plans to further optimize their development processes by automating UI testing and moving from Azure DevOps to GitHub, “I’m excited because Bitrise offers tighter integration with GitHub out of the box and opens the door for even more possibilities for what we can accomplish with Bitrise,” shared Ganesh.
The team are also looking to explore upgrading their machines to improve build speed further and leverage optimization features like Release Management and Caching, “I’m really looking forward to what’s possible with Bitrise next.” shared Ganesh.
The team are also looking to explore upgrading their machines to improve build speed further and leverage optimization features like Release Management and Caching, “I’m really looking forward to what’s possible next.”
A partnership built for what’s next
Beyond the power of the platform itself, what stands out most for Elli is the partnership it has established with Bitrise. The team’s collaborative approach to every challenge enables both companies to work as one and gives Elli’s mobile team the confidence they have a partner that can support them now and as their needs change in the future.
“Over the last three years, the support from Bitrise has really stood out. Whenever we raised issues, they quickly brought in the right people, we worked through it together, and within weeks had a solution we were happy with. It feels like we’re one team focused on solving problems. It’s not the usual ‘submit a support ticket and wait months’ experience you can get with other vendors. Bitrise consistently goes the extra step to help and support, and that’s what really makes the difference.”
Ganesh Bala Subramanian, Engineering Team Lead, Elli
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