Summary

At Maven Clinic, the world's largest virtual clinic for women and families, member experience is paramount. Central to this is meeting members where they are and providing the support they need when they need it. As a result, mobile is crucial for its future. To enhance its digital health offerings and deliver high-quality, personalized care, Maven Clinic partnered with Bitrise to transform its mobile development. Together, they reduced build times by almost 50%, strengthened security, and optimized its Telehealth, education and support app to provide a superior member experience.

Challenge

Prior to Bitrise, the Maven Clinic iOS team ran builds and handled CI/CD on an on-premise macOS build server. At the same time, the Android team took turns running automation scripts on their local machines, depending on who was managing the release.

This setup made the mobile build and CI/CD process highly manual, with only a few steps automated within the local scripts. Most of the team's work required human intervention, leading to time-consuming and redundant tasks. Preparing a build for release could take an entire day, alongside other team meetings and responsibilities. Even then, the handoff was far from seamless, with follow-ups often needed during the quality assurance process.

“The mobile development process was extremely inefficient, prone to human error, and required too much manual intervention at every step. It was clear we needed a new approach.“
_{Ben Piatt, Mobile Software Engineer at Maven Clinic}

Adding to the complexity, Maven Clinic used GitLab for code source control, with all pull requests going through GitLab's continuous integration (CI) runners. While GitLab offers a robust CI/CD solution for engineering teams, the unique challenges of mobile app development—like macOS runners and app distribution—can cause friction, which Maven Clinic wanted to avoid.

“Our infrastructure team handled the setup and upkeep. But on the mobile side, engineers had to customize GitLab to create mobile releases. Not only was it a highly manual process, but only one person on the Android team really understood it, creating a single point of failure,“ shared Ben.

For example, Android engineers were expected to build, maintain, and deploy Docker containers—tasks that were not part of their typical day-to-day, wasting valuable time.

As the company continued to grow rapidly, its pool of shared GitLab resources for all engineering was not keeping pace with the surge in productivity brought on by the influx of new engineers. By 2023, the situation had reached a breaking point.

“Pull requests and build and deploy jobs for Android and iOS were taking 45 minutes or more when they should have taken 15 minutes or less. Jobs frequently timed out and failed, requiring reruns because we didn't have the resources to complete them,“ shared Ben.

Maven's existing mobile development setup was severely impacting the team's efficiency and velocity. Bitrise was already under consideration at this point, but this fast-tracked the decision to move forward. The team began seeking a solution to automate mobile build and testing workflows, enabling scheduled, consistent, and repeatable releases. Their ultimate goal was to achieve a one-click build and deploy process for all mobile releases.

Solution

Bitrise products adopted:

Insights

Release Management

Build Cache

CI/CD

Maven Clinic's leadership team was introduced to Bitrise by project lead Ben Piatt and an iOS engineer who had also used it previously. "We knew Bitrise would eliminate many of the manual tasks we were performing and provide us with a trusted partner with a strong reputation in the mobile space," said Ben.

The team wanted to do proper due diligence to ensure they made the right choice, so they explored other options to compare with Bitrise, including Jenkins and CircleCI. While both offered some of the functionality they required, they quickly realized those options would either require the same extensive customization necessary for GitLab or wouldn't provide the specialized mobile development support they needed.

“Bitrise stood out for a few key reasons. Firstly, it is mobile-focused, and that was extremely important to us. Also, it required minimal configuration to get it up and running, which was a huge bonus.“
_{Ben Piatt, Mobile Software Engineer at Maven Clinic}

After thoroughly evaluating the other available options, Maven Clinic adopted Bitrise's full suite of products to streamline their mobile development and distribution, making it faster and more cost-efficient.

The goal was to fully automate their Android and iOS build and release processes. The first step involved rerouting all pull request checks from GitLab to Bitrise. Drawing on previous experience, the team swiftly replicated this setup at Maven Clinic.

Next, they integrated webhooks from their self-hosted GitLab instance into Bitrise, establishing the necessary triggers. “Migrating this critical part of the process to Bitrise—while maintaining job status communication with GitLab—was a major milestone for the team,“ said Ben.

With Bitrise Release Management, Maven Clinic was able to completely automate publishing to both the App Store and Google Play, significantly enhancing their release efficiency.

“With Bitrise Release Management, we've fully automated release processes for both platforms and created workflows for testing and QA, eliminating our dependency on GitLab for build, deployment, and testing.“
‍_{Ben Piatt, Mobile Software Engineer at Maven Clinic}

Results

• Improved transparency and collaboration

  With enhanced visibility and coordination with the web, backend, and quality assurance teams, they can now better plan and execute mobile releases. Slack messages are now sent automatically to update teams throughout the release process. As a result, no human intervention is required.
• Increased efficiency

  Automation has reduced manual tasks like stakeholder coordination on Slack and Jira ticket linking, leading to quicker releases.
• Faster regression testing

  Automated tests now run without manual intervention, cutting regression cycle time from days to hours and resulting in higher-quality releases.
• Smoother feature flagging

  Clear release timing and updates ensure managers know exactly when to flip features on or off or target specific audiences, making rollouts more seamless.
• Faster build times

  Bitrise's Remote Build Cache has reduced build times by nearly 50%, even as the codebase expanded, resulting in significant performance improvements.
• Lower risk, greater peace of mind

  Now, with no need to share engineering resources, bottlenecks are reduced, resulting in a more reliable process. Plus, Bitrise's reliable infrastructure and expert support give Maven Clinic greater peace of mind.
• Dedicated mobile support

  Direct access to Bitrise mobile experts via a dedicated Slack channel enables fast issue resolution and the ability to shape future features.
• Strategic mobile focus

  Mobile is now a dedicated focus within the organization with the goal of achieving a one-click build and deployment solution for all mobile releases now in sight.

The future

“As we move forward, mobile will remain a vital part of what we do at Maven Clinic as we continue to deliver on our commitment to providing high-quality personalized care to every family, everywhere. With Bitrise's expertise and commitment to mobile, we have been able to overcome its unique challenges and deliver a superior experience for our members.“
_{Ben Piatt, Mobile Software Engineer at Maven Clinic}

Ready to achieve the same results? Reach out to our team today, and let’s transform your mobile development to create experiences your customers will love!