This newsletter has a tariff on it now, which means you'll need to pay 150% to continue reading. No wait, make that 250%. No, 25%. Actually, we were just now talking to some other folks at your company and have reached a verbal agreement on the terms of potentially discussing the possibility of making a deal that’ll bring it to 50%. Oh no, actually, it will be 72% because I just saw two clouds that looked kind of like a 7 and a 2, which is a sign.
Thankfully $0 times any number is still $0, so no matter what kind of new tariffs get randomly announced, you’ll never have to pay for the Flight Deck. Each and every month, for free, we bring you advice mobile developers should give to their younger selves (unless you’re currently young, which is honestly kind of rude), discussions on how great apps can become popular apps, new ways to enforce your architecture in Swift, updates on Apple vs the lawman, and invites to the very best party at WWDC.
Read on for this month’s highlights.
Posts we liked
Netflix Android app testing at scale
With millions upon millions of Android customers (there are no official, exact numbers on Android installations, so you’ll have to trust us on this one) essentially everything Netflix’s Android teams have done since they first shipped the app 14 years ago has been done at scale. Including their ever-evolving testing process, which they use to keep CPVLOTS (Crashes Per Views of Love on the Spectrum) to a minimum. Did I make that last metric up? Only one way to find out.
Goodbye code reviews, hello Harmonize: enforce your architecture in Swift
Harmonize is an open-source linter for Swift that enforces architectural patterns and best practices. Why do you need this when you and every other iOS team has SwiftLint? Well, because SwiftLint can't be used to enforce architectural preferences, it’s of little use in helping your team maintain a clean, consistent codebase. Harmonize can do this, and Stelios Frantzeskakis explains how.
How a single line of code can brick your iPhone
Guilherme Rambo writes about what he calls “one of his favorite iOS vulnerabilities” that he’s discovered so far. Learn why the line “notify_post("com.apple.MobileSync.BackupAgent.RestoreStarted")” was able to send many iOS devices into a reboot loop, how Guilherme discovered it, what he got paid for doing so, and how long it took Apple to fix it once he reported all the details to them. Â
Advice to my younger self after 15 years of building apps
Tjeerd in 't Veen just celebrated his birthday (happy birthday to him and anyone else reading this newsletter who has ever had a birthday) and he took time to write about the biggest lessons he’s learned over many years of app development. Lessons like why not understanding code doesn’t mean it’s bad code, why it’s always best to solve an issue properly the first time, why your favorite framework isn’t the “best” framework, and other key advice he’s picked up over years of experience.
The great app that nobody knows about
Great apps aren’t always popular apps. Why not and how can you fix this? This may not be an important question for the popular app you work on at your day job, but it’s almost certainly an important question for that side project you’ve been building on the weekends. Jordan Morgan looks at how he’s steadily gotten more and more users (and gradually increased revenue) for his own great app.
A judge just blew up Apple’s control of the App Store
Effective immediately, Apple can no longer impose “any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside an app,” restrict developers’ style, formatting, or placement of links for purchases outside of an app, interfere with consumers’ choice to leave an app with anything beyond “a neutral message apprising users that they are going to a third-party site,” or charge a 27% commission on alternative payment options provided by apps. Now Apple will only make 390 billion dollars annually, instead of 391 billion.
Go figure
Did you know that:
- 53% of mobile engineers report spending between 2 to 5 hours per release on non-productive tasks alone.
- 49% say their biggest frustration with their team’s mobile release processes is time wasted on manual steps.
- 66% of teams believe they’d see moderate to extreme benefits from improved release coordination. 34% of teams have apparently either given up or already used Runway.
How do we know all this? We recently ran a survey of 300 engineers across the US and Europe – look out for more of our findings in future!
Posts we wrote, discussions we’re hosting, and reports we’re reporting Â
You've probably heard of Skyscanner, and you’re probably among the many millions of folks who have used their apps. What you may not have known is that, some time ago, Skyscanner invested in building an in-house mobile release platform called Skytrain. It served them well enough, but they still faced issues. Read how “good enough” mobile releases were actually weighing down their org and slowing product development, and how they leverage Runway to solve all of that.
The ROI of mobile release management (Live discussion)
Join us on May 22nd for a live discussion with Andra Georgescu from Skyscanner and Kaleb Hermes from SoFi. We’ll be digging into brand new data from our latest ROI report — drawn from tens of thousands of releases — that show just how much mobile teams are impacted by outdated, fragmented, manual releases (and how much they have to gain by improving them).
Mobile release management ROI (Downloadable report)
Wait a second, isn’t this just a slight variation on the title of the previous link? Good eye, it is! The difference, as implied by the parenthetical, is that this link leads you to the ROI report that we’ll be digging into during our live event. Read it ahead of time and you’ll be even more prepared for the discussion we’re having later this month.
Runway featured feature
Just about every release requires pulling together different kinds of internal release notes and changelogs designed to keep the wider org aware of what’s shipping and to maintain a historical record of updates.
Customers and users also need release notes created for them, at least if you’re aiming higher than the standard  “Bugfixes and improvements.” And you probably do want to aim higher.
Happily, Runway can auto-generate release notes that are intended for different audiences. Using AI, which according to Mark Zuckerberg will soon increase our number of friendships by 500%, Runway can draft release notes based on code changes (PRs and commits, no actual source code) and project management tickets, tailored for whichever audience the notes are meant for. When you use this for app store release notes, Runway understands the context and any constraints enforced by the store in question (character limits, disallowed special characters, etc.).
For more granular and standardized outputs, Runway can also assemble list-like changelogs focused either on the code work in the release’s diff or the project management tickets associated with the release. If you have a standardized approach you’d like to replicate over and over again, you can also create template-based release notes that follow a standard form but contain tokens (e.g. {workItems}, {contributorsCount}, {releasePilot}) which are populated dynamically for the release in question.
Events
Runway’s WWDC Eve party returns again this year on June 7th! 🎉
There is only one bar and/or restaurant directly across the street from the Apple Mothership and it's the Duke of Edinburgh, a cool British pub that's been around as long as Apple itself. It’s entirely possible Steve Jobs thought up the idea of Apple computers while eating mashed potatoes there.
Visit Apple Park on June 7th and then walk across the street at 6:30pm to join Runway for drinks, snacks, and good mobile company.
Does Steve Wozniak drink here and reminisce about how Steve Jobs pitched him the early idea for selling Macintoshes over mashed potatoes? He didn’t last year, but we have to check back again this year to make sure.  Join us!
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This newsletter is at an end, but your email inbox has probably been filling up behind it as you’ve been reading. Ignore all those new messages and check out the Flight Deck archive instead. Who cares about an email you’ve received today when you could learn about some cool stuff in one we sent out six months ago?
