Welcome to the Flight Deck’s very first issue of 2025, aka the year of Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini getting added into everything whether we want them there or not. Soon we’ll no longer be able to imagine a world where we can’t ask our phones to create an emoji of an anthropomorphized egg wearing a cowboy hat and swinging a lasso (the Unicode Emoji Consortium be damned) and that’s probably a good thing? Maybe? Regardless, we hope your 2025 has been a good one so far, and continues to be over the 11 months to come.

In each and every one of those months, regardless of whether we’re in the depths of winter or the warm glow of summer, the Flight Deck will bring you strategies for building great mobile apps, videos we made while standing on a roof, articles about what to do if an Apple update appears to irrevocably break your app, and discussions of why mobile releases need to be managed (and how to manage them).

Read on for this month’s highlights.

Posts we liked

A successful mobile release strategy: launching to customers

In part 2 of his 2 part series, Luke Stringer examines how a team can reliably deliver updates to their users and establish consistent releases that build stronger relationships with those users: from app submission to managing and monitoring phased/staged rollouts to creating a repeatable process that each and every squad can follow. Luke conveniently links to part 1 from right up top in case you want to read the entire series.  

How one new Xcode 16 feature helped my team eliminate 66,000 lines of code

Xcode 16’s new buildable folders don't depend on pbxproj references for recognising files, which makes it much easier for teams to avoid massive merge conflicts with file changes. Learn how Makwan Barzan’s team was able to use this feature to remove 4,000 lines of code in over 100 unused Swift files and 62,000 lines of references to pxbproj files. Less code, fewer conflicts, more fun.  

Strategies for developing resilient mobile native mobile applications

The fine folks over at Google Cloud and O’Reilly published Engineering Reliable Mobile Applications, a long pamphlet (short book?) written by several of their SREs back in 2019. It’s now free in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB format. You don’t even have to give them your email address. The five authors walk through how to SRE your mobile app so that you’re never just relying on the hope that everything works out with a release.

The Apple developers who came in from the cold

Rogue Amoeba have been making audio apps for Mac (and iOS) since 2002. And over the (many) years since then, Apple has put increasing emphasis on securing OS X from potential threats. For a company whose audio routing, capture, and editing software requires custom drivers that function, essentially, at the whim of Apple, keeping their software going has required a tightrope walk. Until, in 2020, disaster struck as changes in Mac OS 11 Beta appeared to irreparably break their audio capture software, and Apple showed zero interest in helping them. Here’s how they embarked on a years-long odyssey to fix this.

What’s new in Android Studio Ladybug

Do you like AI? Google is betting you do as this stable release of Android Studio Ladybug 🐞 Feature Drop (2024.2.2) is focused mostly, but not entirely, on Gemini code assistance features like Code Transform, Rename, and Rethink; it’ll even analyze your code changes to generate commit messages and create documentation for you, which, it should be noted, Google strongly recommends you take some time to “refine and perfect” before sharing.  

Posts (and videos) we wrote (and recorded)

The Runway 2024 year in review

It’s January 31st, which makes this arguably the last day of the year where it’s appropriate to look back on the previous year before putting our focus entirely on the runway ahead of us. In 2024 we built more big features, enhancements, and a longer list of new automations & integrations than any year before. (As you might expect, we plan for 2025 to surpass it.)

Why mobile releases need to be managed

This isn’t a post we wrote, but a webinar we hosted (and recorded). Take this opportunity to watch and see what our co-founders Isabel and Gabe look like as they discuss how the complexity and cost of releases eat into efficiency, budgets, and your ability to deliver value at speed. Bugs in production impact KPIs and revenue, and frustrate users. Overburdened engineers — stuck firefighting and babysitting releases — struggle to stay happy and productive. Learn why effective mobile release management is key for teams looking to ship confidently and scale efficiently.

Comparing the top pre-production and beta app distribution tools

Scrambling to find a replacement for App Center? Runway’s Build Distro software enables teams to clearly define and group the different types of builds they distribute and streamlines the process of getting those builds into teammates’ hands. But how does Build Distro compare to existing distribution options like TestFlight, Firebase, the very soon to be discontinued App Center, and others? As you might have guessed based on the fact that we’re writing about it in this newsletter, it compares pretty favorably. Read this guide to learn exactly how favorably.

Runway featured feature

We know that not every member of every team can or should spend time in Runway. But that doesn’t mean these folks aren’t impacted by and involved in your release process in some way, which is why for any project management tickets that are part of a release, Runway can automatically post comments containing build information and install links for release candidates that contain code associated with those tickets.

This gives your team a quick and easy way to access test builds for a given item of work from the ticket side, and can be especially helpful for folks like Product and QA.

Each ticket comment includes:

• The build number and workflow name
• A link to the build in your CI
• If the build produced an app store build (e.g. a build in TestFlight), an install link for that build as well
• A list of all associated commits that were included in the build

It’s one of our goals as a platform to make everyone’s lives easier (at least as it relates to releasing a mobile app) whether they’re logged into Runway or not. This feature is one of the ways we accomplish that goal.EventsIt’s winter in North Earth and summer in South Earth, a time when most mobile software engineering related events go into hibernation. As such, we don’t have any event updates for you this month, but next month we’ll have a list of upcoming plans for March and April. We look forward to seeing you out there in the real world.  

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