Everything you need to live abroad

"Bitrise allowed us to maintain an agile development environment, push features at an incredibly fast pace to both testers and end-users, and keep our app up-to-date."

Building a community for people who share the same homeland

Homeis is the first digital platform for foreign-born communities around the world — aspiring to build a better world for immigrants. Through their initiative, people can join a community of locals from their homeland, find friends to share aspects of their cultural background, and form a network of mutual aid and assistance.

Their mission is to help immigrants bring their two homes together, make their integration process easier, and enable them to discover their new country — together with people who understand their original one. The app also offers guides on all the-need-to-know aspects from opening a bank account, visa applications, or filing taxes to finding career opportunities.

Frequent releases require a CI/CD solution

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Homeis currently has around 30 employees, out of which 12 are developers who are responsible for developing their web and their mobile application. Their tech stack is pure Javascript with the mobile apps written with React-Native. This allows developers to easily switch between frontend and backend-related tasks.

Their release cycles are very frequent: they deploy to production a few times a day, including at least one mobile release every week. They realized early on how important it is to have a solid CI/CD pipeline with all-around test coverage, as well as how much faster a cloud-based tool can make their processes by removing the need for developers to run builds on their local machines. Since they’ve had great experiences with CI/CD for their web app, they started looking for a similar solution specifically for their mobile app.

They found Bitrise approximately two years ago and saw it as a great solution that's flexible enough to allow them to connect all the wires in a simple way. When they first tried it, they realized how easy it was to create, customize, and connect these workflows. Since then, they’ve been running their mobile apps on the platform with great success.

A unique set of workflows to fit specific needs

The mobile team built a set of very unique workflows on Bitrise, consisting of three main flavors: development, staging, and production. A development workflow is built every time a pull request is merged to the develop branch via a trigger. It also runs their entire e2e test suite and unit tests. This flavor is running against their development servers. The staging phase happens when they want to release something to Google Play or the App Store, and want to run tests against this environment. The production stage is when they make their apps available worldwide.

For their staging and production apps, they patch the JavaScript bundle using CodePush for minor bug fixes between store releases. Since CodePush can break the app if it is done with a native change or a change in the React-Native bridge, they wanted to be on the safe side and created a rule of versioning for their applications. They adopted semantic versioning and slightly changed it to fit their needs: the major pattern is used for internal identification of big release milestones, minor is whenever they release a native change that prevents code pushes, and patch is when they release to the app stores. They also set up a tagging mechanism on each branch to trigger builds for their stage/production builds accordingly.

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An up-to-date digital platform that keeps users happy

By creating their own customized workflows in Bitrise to fit their specific mobile development needs, the Homeis team managed to reach a very high level of efficiency in their code releases and tests. Using the platform has enabled them to continuously deliver high-quality software: they are now able to deploy new iterations of the app on any given day.

These unique workflows in Bitrise allow them to always maintain an agile development environment, in which they can push features at an incredibly fast pace to both testers and end-users, helping them keep their app up-to-date. By now, Homeis has more than 750K users across several communities, such as among French, Israeli, and many Asian, African, and Latin American immigrants — giving them access to a one-stop-shop for everything they need to live a happy life abroad.