CI/CD, which stands for continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, is a set of practices for application development. The primary purpose of CI/CD is to automate processes that are fairly straightforward yet would usually require human intervention. By making these processes non-dependent developers, more resources can be allocated to other areas of development. This trend has become more popular recently, with a reported 24% of DevOps processes being fully automated. But, most of all, mobile is one area of interest for CI/CD pipelines.
Mobile application development stands to gain quite a lot, considering the environment they find themselves in. Often, user perceptions are the most influential factor of a mobile app. Harsh customers with high expectations can often be insurmountable, and most of which are quick to uninstall. Furthermore, negative connotations surrounding an application are fairly inflexible, given that apps are given ratings that are hard to change. Simultaneously, there is an explosion in user growth and competition within the space. This means that the apps that do want to see success must push themselves to go farther and be more efficient than other similar applications. Fortunately, CI/CD pipelines seem to solve this problem on both fronts.
To meet this demand, many applications have focused on making CI/CD pipelines more accessible to mobile developers. Bitrise, for instance, has a centralized focus delivering CI/CD with accompanying third-party integration. Through these mobile platforms, you can automate things like app releases, notifications, code signing, and other menial tasks which would traditionally divert effort away from development.
Ultimately, the greater accessibility of CI/CD pipeline is a positive within the mobile development space. By making the skill ceiling greater for developers, applications can become superior to previous releases, and that will translate as better products to end-users. With the implementation of CI/CD in mobile, the future of mobile apps is looking brighter.
Source: BitRise.io
