Welcome to the Flight Deck’s February issue, coming to you live either from the depths of winter (boo!), from the heights of summer (yay!), or, if you are a being without form who exists across all time and space and happens to read this newsletter to keep up with trends in mobile software development, from the season-less expanses of endless eternity where all of human achievement and folly is but a momentary blip in the infinite cosmos. Whatever the season is or isn’t where you are, we hope things are going well!

Regardless of our current position relative to the greater spacetime continuum, the Flight Deck will bring you in-depth looks at the cross-platform development landscape, videos we made while standing on a roof, articles about exception handling in Kotlin, and discussions of why you should shift left when testing your mobile app.

Read on for this month’s highlights.

Posts we liked

How to choose the right approach to cross-platform mobile development

Over at the Pragmatic Engineer, Gergely Orosz, Elin Nilsson, and Fatos Morina delve into the evolving landscape of cross-platform mobile development. Learn which frameworks and libraries are most popular (you can probably guess: Flutter and React Native), learn which other ones are nipping at their heels (you may also be able to guess these), hear what they each excel at and don’t do quite as well with, and see which ones some very popular apps are using.

SwiftUI – Navigation view if needed

Deep Dish Swift (see you there in April) co-founder and lead fastlane maintainer Josh Holtz returns to his blog for the first time in three years to explain how he solved the problem of ensuring an SDK he’s writing will show a toolbar whenever it is needed but hide it when it’s not. Something straightforward to do when writing your own app becomes much more difficult when doing it for an SDK, but Josh found a nice solution to his problem.  

A guide to Android exception handling in Kotlin Coroutines

Dobri Kostadinov notes that “exception handling in Kotlin is often misunderstood," which is a problem considering that bugs in Kotlin cause just as many problems as any other bug. What is a mobile engineer to do? Get gud as they say (wait, do they still say that?) at confidently handling coroutine errors in any project.

Apple open sources Swift Build

You may have heard about this already, but what does this change actually mean for Swift? Can you now build an iOS app without Xcode? The answer to that question is no, of course, so what exactly can you do? Vincent Pradeilles explains in both a blog post and a video, providing two ways to learn about this, depending on your mood.    

Code completion in GitHub Copilot for Xcode is now generally available

This newsletter has occasionally been known to poke fun at the hype around AI (for example, see last month’s opening paragraph), but that does not mean we don’t think it can be useful. According to a recent survey of 50,000 developers by Accenture and our own survey of casually looking around at people who are writing code near us, 70% of software engineers currently use Copilot. So it’s a big deal that it’s finally fully available for Xcode.  

Posts (and videos) we wrote (and recorded), and that were written by Runway users (about us)

Why you should shift left when testing your mobile app

“Shift left” is the idea that testing of all kinds — QA, performance, security, UI/UX — should be moved as early in the development lifecycle as possible. This is especially relevant for mobile due to reasons we often discuss in the newsletter. Instead of leaving testing to final QA or hoping your new feature will be functionally perfect as designed and built, you begin poking at and scrolling through both your code and UI using automated and manual testing methods starting at almost the moment you write your first new line of code.

The subtle art of making mobile releases boring

Mobile releases shouldn’t be chaotic. They should be smooth. They should be predictable. They should be boring. The team at Squarespace gets it. In this entertaining post, Alan Cooke breaks down how they built a modern mobile release process that prioritizes automation, consistency, and visibility. Why is this in the "posts we wrote" section? Because Squarespace uses Runway and Alan discusses us in this post on their engineering blog, detailing the part we play in making their releases so seamless that no one even thinks about them — because they just work.

Why mobile engineers dread releases (and how to fix it)

Mobile app releases shouldn’t feel like chaos. This video in our “guy in a straw hat stands on a roof and explains things” series breaks down why mobile engineers dread release management and how outdated processes — like manual checklists, ad hoc scripts, and fragmented tooling — are holding teams back. Discover how automation factors into a stress-free, efficient process that lets engineers focus on what they do best: building great apps. This also isn’t a post we wrote, but you get the idea.

Runway featured feature

We have just one month left until Microsoft sends App Center off to the big deleted server in the sky. Maybe you don’t use App Center, or maybe you did, and you quickly stopped using it right after Microsoft announced they were going to do this last year, so it’s no big deal to you.

Or maybe you’ve been putting off switching until the last minute since you have other, more important things to do and are now scrambling as the last minute has officially arrived. If that’s the case, there’s never been a better time to take a look at our powerful, easy-to-use, and very appropriately-named build distribution platform, Build Distro.

Why should you switch to Build Distro?

Seamlessly share WIP builds as early and as often as you want, with whomever you want, using branch-based, PR-based, team-based, or even dedicated personal “build buckets” for everyone on the team.

• Simple to set up, with a clean, easy-to-use interface.
• Lets you separate different build favors, scoped for specific folks across your team.  
• Integrates with your CI/CD to automatically group builds based on branches,  workflows, and authors.
• Makes it easy to install builds via a QR code in the platform or posted on PRs, tickets, or via Slack.
• Keeps testing, staging, and production builds clearly separated so you never accidentally release the wrong build.
• Supports your SSO provider and directory sync for straightforward user management

Learn more about Build Distro.

Events

For the past couple of editions, this section has contained some variation of “We don’t have any events coming up, but stay tuned.” Well, the time you’ve been staying tuned for has arrived. See us at our upcoming events in April:

• Android Makers in Paris from April 10th to 11th
• Deep Dish Swift in Chicago from April 27th to 29th

Share a famous Chicago hot dog and/or a Paris hot dog with us. Yes, Paris-style hot dogs are real. Do you think we’d make something like that up?

You’ve now arrived at the end of this newsletter. Since it’s Friday, you have our permission to close your laptop, knock off work, and go watch the latest episode of Severance.