Bitrise on AWS: macOS virtualized CI builder

My main use case for Bitrise  is for automating CI/CD in the projects where I work. I use Bitrise  to automate processes for pushing releases, building versions, and building PRs. When we open a PR, we automate the whole process, so Bitrise is responsible for running the project build, the unit tests that we have, and also checking that nothing is breaking in SwiftLint. These are the use cases that we have today in the company that uses Bitrise.

The best features that Bitrise offers are the automation and also the speed that we get. It makes easier some processes that we have internally here in the projects, adding speed, agility, and ease of maintenance of the project, and maintaining the quality of the code that we have in the project for the final delivery.

Bitrise helps speed up the development process in my team because we stop doing the whole process of pushing versions and build checks all manually. Bitrise does this in an automated way. We configure the tool and then it already does all this automatically and with agility in the process. It facilitates deployment processes for us here, reducing development time, configuration time, among other things.

A positive impact that Bitrise has had on my organization is that it kept the version releases consistent and we were able to catch PR problems, build and test problems, and SwiftLint issues during code review time. We were able to catch these points in an automated way through Bitrise. This had a very positive impact in terms of release deployment time and quality. Bitrise has helped us a lot in these processes. This has been a very positive impact for us here, especially because we work with several teams, and we don't have that much manual control over this. Bitrise manages to take care of this automatically and maintain the quality of the whole release process.

Today I don't see any improvement points for Bitrise. It serves us very well, and the project is going very well with Bitrise. At certain times we have failures within the tool itself where we need to debug, look at logs, and understand these points. Because of that, it wouldn't be a 10.

I have been using Bitrise for five years.

Bitrise has not had any stability issues for now.

I would rate Bitrise's scalability as great.

I consider Bitrise's customer support very good.

I have used Fastlane, but in some aspects the tool was not meeting our needs. So we migrated everything to Bitrise.

The interview was great and very intuitive. I was able to understand everything and the questions were very objective.

Bitrise was evaluated between Fastlane and Bitrise for continued use.

I would advise them to implement Bitrise as soon as possible in the project to make it easier to automate delivery and version release processes, including on the mobile side, which is my main area. I would give some suggestions for additional configurations. Bitrise with well-defined and well-configured processes is Bitrise that will work very well in an application. I would also advise them to understand which processes they need and what would be necessary within their project so that they don't make mistakes, so they can do an optimal configuration and have a great experience with the tool. I would rate this product a 9 overall.

My main use case for Bitrise  is as a build and deployment mechanism. I use Bitrise  at the end of the day to generate a nightly build and also for all our release processes to the App Store and Play Store. It helped us with our main use case by solving issues around parallelization in the generation of the builds and also how to generate a build per pull request and share the artifact with the developers without giving them access to Bitrise itself.

Bitrise positively impacted my organization because the company used to do a release monthly or every two months, but with Bitrise system, we were able to optimize the process and now we do bi-weekly releases.

In achieving bi-weekly releases with Bitrise, we noticed improvements in time saved. Our release and build process went really fast, taking 20 minutes to generate a build for developers to test and for QA, and that is all thanks to Bitrise for always bringing the latest machines, having their system updated, and maintaining it well.

I believe the best features Bitrise offers include their support team, which is the best feature they actually offer. They are really helpful and always jump in to help and are genuinely interested in your process and how to optimize your internal deployments and building system. Recently, they gave a new scaffolding to make the boilerplate easier and to structure your Bitrise files, so that would be the best feature they have right now.

Bitrise gives you full control on the virtual machine and the processes, which has helped me specifically. They encourage you to do things right but don't force you to go through a template or a specific recipe that they have, so you can actually write your own scripts. Recently, for the EPO launch, we were coordinating the integration with Warsquare, a third-party company, and Bitrise actually helped us to do the connection between the virtual machine and their services, even though they are not required to do that. Whenever we spot any bug around our building process, they always jump in to help with a custom script, feedback, or insights from other clients that they have, and they also investigate for themselves what the problem was.

Bitrise's support team always receives feedback, so if you have any blocking point or improvement area, you can share it and they actually do it, which is something that surprised me. What they can improve right now is around the charts and metrics they provide. Right now, it is pretty generic about the performance of your machine and how much time each process takes, but they could evolve those charts to be more mobile DevOps metrics specific.

I have been using Bitrise for the last five years.

Bitrise is stable, pretty much.

On a factor of a Bitrise client, I think its scalability is great. They allow you to launch as many machines as you can.

Bitrise's customer support is really good. They are quite supportive and always answer. The only thing that might be an impact if you are an American company is that most of their team is based in Europe, so for critical feedback or bug resolution that requires an architect from their side, you might need to wait until the next day or use European hours, but they always have someone on call.

I did not previously use a different solution before Bitrise at Hinge Health, but I was using TestFairy and App Center before. I switched to Bitrise because it is more stable and it gives you full control of the virtual machines and is easier to implement.

Around time saved, I think is where we got the best return on investment with Bitrise because our build process went from taking hours to 20 minutes or even faster. Regarding other money saved or employees needed, I do not have any specifics around that.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing with Bitrise was positive. They have a credit system and then evolved to a build number system. They also give you a buffer. For example, if you are reaching your limit, they notify you, and you also have a buffer. They guarantee you that you never run out of processes, ensuring that you will always be able to generate your build, no matter if you expand or pass that limit, and then coordinate in your next schedule an expansion of the number of builds or credits that you can use.

Before choosing Bitrise, I evaluated other options including TestFairy and Runway , but at the end of the day, we stuck with Bitrise because it was what was already implemented at Hinge Health.

I advise others looking into using Bitrise to make sure that you have a good understanding of user roles and to whom you provide access to the tool, and to have a clear understanding of mobile operations. Whenever you use Bitrise, feel free to reach out to customer support for integration and help, because they can schedule one-on-ones with their experts and provide you with a full onboarding on how to use Bitrise and do things properly. I would rate this experience a 10 out of 10.

Currently, we are building and deploying iOS and Android applications through Bitrise . We have a web maker tool through which we build the iOS IPA and Android APK packets. We have multiple pipelines over Bitrise , and in a single project, I have multiple workflows in which one workflow deploys the application over bitrise.io and one pipeline I use to deploy over the Play Store and App Store. The main use case is building the Android packets and iOS packets and deploying them over the Play Store and App Stores.

The best features I would say are that if we want to build an application for iOS, we would normally need a Mac, but with Bitrise, we do not need any Mac as Bitrise already provides virtual machines based on my requirements like which Xcode version I have to use, what Android SDK  versions I need, and what Java version I need. Everything Bitrise gives me on its VM machine.

The way Bitrise provides the connectors is a good thing. The main thing which I love about it is that you do not have to write a full script and coding. It is not required in Bitrise as it gives a lot of plugins and we use fastlane, so Bitrise also gives us the flexibility to use fastlane to write the automations. That is also a good thing.

Previously, we used to have multiple MacBooks through which we manually requested a person to deploy the build the application and share the IPA link and APK link with us. But now we have automated everything through Bitrise as it gives on-demand virtual machines and Macs. This is a big benefit, and we have reduced the DevOps engineer count from five to three to manage the mobile applications.

The biggest improvement I would say is that in the workflow, we have a plugin script, and that script window is dynamic. If we are writing something, it automatically gets shrunk. This is the biggest flaw which I have seen in Bitrise. If I am writing any script, it gets shrunk dynamically, and that should be removed or we should be given an option to disable it.

The second thing is that currently we are using Harness  to deploy our applications. Other platforms like Jenkins  have set up webhooks through which we do not have to manually deploy any application and trigger the jobs into Harness . I want the same thing with Bitrise; we should get a Harness connector over Bitrise so that through Harness, we can trigger Bitrise workflows, and we should not give access to all the dev and QA for triggering the workflows. I would suggest that if we can have one Harness connector through which developers just trigger the build and automatically a job gets triggered to Bitrise.

I have been using Bitrise for three years.

Bitrise is stable.

As our code size is increasing, I have never faced challenges scaling my builds as Bitrise gives us the flexibility to increase the virtual machines. Bitrise's scalability is also good.

I have communicated multiple times with Bitrise support regarding my builds and in case we want any older machines. The customer experience I have had is very good. They are very responsive.

Previously in my old setup, we had fastlane through which we used to manually deploy the applications over the TestFlights and Android beta releases. That was everything manual, and here we save a lot of time because I have set up the job triggers through which if anyone is committing to the branch, automatically Bitrise starts building the app, and if it is a development environment, it uploads to bitrise.io. I have also integrated the Microsoft plugins through which automatically developers and QA get notified, and they can download the applications from bitrise.io. Once the testing is done, we manually trigger the job workflow over Bitrise, and it deploys the applications over the TestFlights and beta releases.

The first time I have used Bitrise.

Previously, we used to take one day to deploy the application, but now in thirteen to twenty minutes through our automation and with the help of Bitrise's flexibilities, we deploy the application. That is where we save a big amount of time.

Bitrise supports RBAC, which is the main point where we can isolate our projects based on the developers, QA, and all. We can isolate the accesses and authorization. That is a big point.

I cannot comment much on the governance side because we have never faced any security issues whenever we had an audit. It also provides us the feature of secrets where we can encrypt the secrets, and I think from the perspective of governance and security, it is a good one.

Previously, we had five DevOps engineers, and now we need three DevOps engineers to manage Bitrise. Previously, we had to be dependent on MacBooks, but here we are not dependent on MacBooks as on demand we get the virtual machines and we perform our tasks. I think we have saved a lot of cost.

On the licensing side, we do not manage that, as we have a different team that manages that. The costing is much less if we compare it to acquiring different MacBooks and building the applications. It is cheaper for us.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Bitrise.

If any organization is having a mobile application, I would recommend them to use Bitrise because of its flexibility, scalability, and cheap and on-demand prices. I have rated this review nine out of ten.