Bitrise on AWS: macOS bare metal CI builder

My main use case for Bitrise is for releases, deployment, and distribution for testers.

I have set up multiple workflows for Bitrise so we could be built depending on their repos, on their secrets, and on their specific environments. So we can build a dev environment, build UAT environment, or even production environment builds of our apps, and then it's distributed through Firebase App Tester to our testers.

Bitrise offers quite a lot of valuable features. One of the good features is the ability to choose the machines on which it will run. It also gives you workflow recipes to ease the setup of your CI/CD flow.

Choosing the machines and using workflow recipes in Bitrise just speeds up and frees developers' time, so even managers or testers themselves can choose the flavors and create builds for specific apps. They can do testing without interrupting developers. As for workflow recipes, they're helping to set up it and do some specific hookups to, if you write a message, 'smoke,' or something like that, it will hook up that it's a smoke build and will post in our Slack channel so everyone can see that a new build was created and similar things. Also, recently we have added functionality to post the release notes with the build, so it takes a specific amount of recent commits, and then QAs can see which task is in this build and should we be able to test those tasks with a specific build or we need to create a new one.

It helps us save some action minutes from GitHub Actions and we can use free time from the developer side to build new features or do technical debt and similar things. It just improves the whole workflow for everyone.

I think it could probably be higher, but we probably are not using all the features and functionalities of Bitrise ourselves, so it's hard to give a higher number because I think more features could be done with it, but we are just not using it.

I have been using Bitrise for four and a half years, close to five years.

Read documentation and try talking with Bitrise chatbot if you are stuck on some things. They usually are quite good at providing reasonable answers which will lead you on a proper way to solve your issues.

I would say on average, Bitrise saves probably about 15 minutes a day.

The review process was quite simple, easy to understand, and not too long, so it's not boring. I would rate this review an 8 out of 10.

My main use case for Bitrise is mainly for iPhone builds, mobile development, and mobile builds. It really helps.

I am mainly using Bitrise for iPhone workflows where it handles the certificates, signs the application, tests the build, and finally publishes it to the App Store. This is the whole workflow I am using.

In my opinion, the best features Bitrise offers are that it is easy to create workflows, support always helps us, and it can be used with a lot of different things.

When I say easy to create workflows, it is easy to build workflows because you can select a lot of built-in steps, so they can help you to come up with workflows easier.

Bitrise has positively impacted my organization because we can build the applications easier.

Bitrise has made building applications easier because it has improved the time we are spending on them. It is saving a lot of time. It is really easy for developers to build the applications because they can just invoke those workflows. This makes it easier to find the errors, improve the time, and improve the collaboration.

I think Bitrise can be improved because it is kind of pricey at the moment.

Regarding Bitrise's AI capabilities, I think its accuracy and reliability of output need improvement because from time to time the accuracy is low, but it is good overall.

I have been using Bitrise for four years.

Regarding Bitrise's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are pretty good.

I would advise others looking into using Bitrise to just use them. My rating for this review is 9.

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.