Because we send the Flight Deck out only once a month, using this opener to comment on ongoing trends is nearly impossible. Remember when everyone was doing innie and outie memes from Apple TV’s Severance? Well, that was a little over a week ago, and it couldn’t be more over now. What if we wanted to turn some of the photos from our recent team offsite into Studio Ghibliesque images that allow you to marvel at how cute we are as a company? We could do that, but this edition is shipping on Wednesday and by then, the latest trend may be to turn everyone into a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and we’ll look lame if we’re doing the thing from last week.
You know what’s never lame? The Flight Deck. Every month, we bring you real people solving real problems with real ideas in articles and videos about building inclusive apps for everyone, what you should consider before using SwiftData, how to set up and manage a beta program for your apps, and how big companies like DoorDash manage their mobile releases (hint: it involves Runway).  Â
Read on for this month’s highlights.
Posts we liked
Choosing optimism about iOS 19
Rumors are that Apple is planning a dramatic overhaul of its UI across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Reactions to this were broadly negative for various reasons, but David Smith has decided to face these changes with optimism instead of grumbling. He’s doing this partly because he has to (grumbling has never stopped Apple before) and partly because, in embracing the changes sooner rather than later, he ensures his app stands apart from those resistant to change.
Every user matters: Building inclusive Jetpack Compose apps for everyone
Building a great app takes more than a beautiful UI and useful functionality (though those things are very nice). It’s also about ensuring everyone can actually use your app. Even if your company culture has a strong focus on accessibility, it’s a good idea to continually think through the various ways different users may be interacting with your app. Bhoomi Gadhiya digs into how Jetpack Compose can help you do so. Â
Is it a big deal if Apple’s apps aren’t written in Swift? Does it matter if every app is written in React Native if they’re still printing money selling iPhones? If Apple continues to lag in their AI efforts, we may find out as developers increasingly use tools like Cursor and Replit to become more efficient and write their apps in React instead of Swift. Bryan Irace considers why it’s not great for Apple that releasing apps through the app store is increasingly becoming more difficult than building those apps.
Remember when CI companies focused on CI? In an effort to grow their businesses and differentiate themselves, they’re now dabbling in lots of other things (like signing, security, web, and occasionally even release management) that they often lack the expertise and experience to build the best versions of. Pedro Piñera BuendĂa asks: where does mobile CI go from here?
Key considerations before using SwiftData
Plenty of iOS developers would love to use SwiftData but aren’t sure if it’s mature enough to rely on (for example, it received only minor updates at WWDC last year). Fatbobman (presumably his legal name… just kidding, his real name is Xu Yang) discusses how to approach using SwiftData in your projects.
OWASP’s top ten security risks for mobile apps
Someone somewhere wants your users’ data and will use your app to get to it if they can. What are the most significant vulnerabilities you should be on the lookout for in 2025? OWASP’s latest list goes through the ten biggest risks right now and compares them to their ten biggest risks from previous years. Risk doesn’t remain the same, so your preparation for that risk also needs continual updating.
Go figure
Did you know that mobile teams who use Runway become 32% quicker at recovering from bad releases than they were without it? This is because they can:
- Pull in data from any number of monitoring and crash reporting tools via Rollouts for quicker and more complete signals on app health
- Run automations against any of that data to automatically pause rollouts before unhealthy releases get out of hand
- Roll back bad releases to the most recent stable release whenever needed
Posts (and videos) we wrote (and recorded), and that were written by Runway users (about us) Â
How to set up and run a beta testing program for your mobile app
No matter what kind of app you’re building, you have customers of some kind. Whether you’re B2C or B2B or C2C or C2B or CB2 you want to build an app that those customers find useful and enjoyable, and which is also mostly bug- and crash-free. Beta testing provides an opportunity to find usability problems and performance issues, gather early external feedback, and build excitement for upcoming releases. But how do you do it? Click the link up there to find out.
How DoorDash manages their mobile releases
Manolo Sañudo has been closely involved in DoorDash's release process for quite some time, and in this post on the DoorDash engineering blog, he gives us a peek into how one of the world's top mobile orgs manages its mobile releases. This isn’t on our blog; why is it down here in this section? Well, just as with the Squarespace post we linked to last month, Runway makes a couple of guest appearances. Â
Your release knowledge and tooling is way too distributed
Mobile teams need a ton of tooling and knowledge to release even a minor update to their apps. This weighs mobile engineers down with greater cognitive load, constantly takes them out of their flow with context switching, and leads to communication nuisances and breakdowns between teams and stakeholders. Watch this video to hear Pol Piella’s thoughts on how to deal with knowledge and tooling that is way too distributed. If you prefer reading to watching, we have a blog post on this topic, too.
Runway featured feature
One of the available integration points for Runway’s Rollouts functionality is with observability and analytics tools. You’re able to select key events and monitor them in a number of different ways: by event volume per session or daily active user, by looking at event property values (measured as averages, means, percentiles, etc.), and as deltas over previous releases.
But did you know you can also track filtered events for an even more granular way to surface exactly the kinds of indicators of app health that your team cares about?
Events
Last month we mentioned that we had upcoming events in April. It’s now April, so come see us at our upcoming events:
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- Android Makers in Paris from April 10th to 11th
- Deep Dish Swift in Chicago from April 27th to 29th
Share a famous Chicago pizza (deep dish or tavern style) and/or a Paris pizza with us. Just like we mentioned with hot dogs last month, Paris-style pizza is real, at least according to the guy in St. Louis whose food blog we’re linking to here. And if you can’t trust someone in St. Louis to accurately tell you about French food, who can you trust? Â
This newsletter is at an end. Since it’s the middle of the week, you should check out our archive of older Flight Decks so that you’ll look extra busy doing research on top of your usual coding work.
