A few weeks ago, Apple rejected Fortnite from every iteration of its App Store, continuing what appears to be their never-ending feud with Epic Games. This newsletter, however, would like to do the opposite. We accept Fortnite. If Epic is interested in releasing a version of their Battle Royale / Ariana Grande concert simulator as an email game we can embed anywhere in the Flight Deck, we would welcome it. Imagine the pure thrill of an AI Darth Vader threatening to kill you in real life, right between two articles about mobile software development. Tim Sweeney, we know you’re reading this. Reach out.

Unlike Fortnite, developers who read the Flight Deck and use Runway have everything they need to avoid problems with the App Store (and Play Store too). In each and every edition we express mild skepticism of AI, link to articles that explain in detail why it’s nuts for engineers to be skeptical of AI, share insights about how other mobile developers are thinking about their releases, and invite you to parties and happy hours.  

Read on for this month’s highlights.

Posts we liked

Make Swift error messages human friendly

“This file can’t be opened because it doesn’t exist.” This is just one of hundreds of unclear error messages that Swift may throw at any moment. Which file can’t be opened because it doesn’t exist? Who can say? After all, it doesn’t exist. You can take these error messages as a chance to stop and reflect on the deeper meaning of reality or contribute to Cihat Gündüz’s ErrorKit project and map unhelpful error messages to something much more useful to people.

Prepare your app for Google’s 16 KB page size compatibility requirement

Android devices have long managed memory in 4 KB pages. But Android 16 will take advantage of all the extra RAM Android phones and tablets now have and quadruple this support to 16 KB. That sounds nice, except for one thing: if your app targets Android 15 or above, you are also required to support these page sizes. Here’s how you can prepare your app for this coming update.

Take the WWDC 2025 pre-game quiz

Prepare for WWDC by testing your knowledge of Apple (un)Intelligence, Jony Ive, Ronald Wayne, the history of Apple’s brand, and many other Apple-related things in Jordan Morgan’s quiz. This is the 11th such quiz, and all previous quizzes are available if you missed one. Get a high enough score and you can drink and snack for free at our WWDC Eve happy hour in Cupertino. Get a low score and you can also drink and snack for free because all the drinks and snacks are free.  

My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

Skepticism towards AI has been occasionally expressed in this newsletter. For example, see the reference to Apple (un)Intelligence above. Not because we don’t think it’s helpful, but because AI hype is pretty easy to mock. Now, Thomas Ptacek is making us feel kind of bad about the mocking. To ensure he never calls us nuts, we’re sharing his excellent article in which he mostly debunks all the most common complaints and misconceptions software developers have about AI.

16 things for Android developers to know from Google I/O

Google I/O just happened. Aside from all the many talks about how to put Gemini in your app or on your website or into the brain of the iron golem you’ve been building on weekends or even in your smoothie, they also presented what’s ahead for Android in the coming year. Here are 16 things you should take away from I/O as an Android developer, and only one is AI-related!

Go figure

Did you know that:

• 77% of mobile teams report they see incidents causing delays or the need for a hotfix at least every four releases.
• 66% of these teams believe all the above incidents could have been prevented with a more transparent, centralized release process.

How do we know all this? Did we just make it up? No! We wouldn’t do that. We recently ran a survey of 300+ mobile engineers — look out for more of our findings in future!

Posts we wrote, discussions we’re hosting, and reports we’re reporting  

AI will never build your app and your releases will never be fully automated (Blog post)

We’ve already mentioned AI numerous times, so why not do so again? The more you can automate away the busywork of software development and mobile releases, the more time you’ll have to put into building and improving your app. But no robot can do the hard work of strategizing, planning, adapting, and collaborating around complex apps and systems. AI and automation are tools we can wield, not magic spells that can create and scale any idea we have.

The ROI of mobile release management (Recorded event)

Late last month, we hosted a live discussion with Andra Georgescu from Skyscanner and Kaleb Hermes from SoFi. This ephemeral moment in time has since passed us by and faded away like tears in the rain, but it was thankfully captured on video. Watch our recording to learn just how much mobile teams are impacted by outdated, fragmented, manual releases (and how much they can gain by improving them).

How Gusto uses Runway to stay focused on empowering work (Customer story)

“At first, I was thinking, ‘Our release process works. It’s fine.’ But as we went through the Runway demo, it occurred to me — wouldn’t it be nice to make releases happen without me or our leads involved every time? That idea was a big selling point — the possibility of involving more people to shoulder some of the responsibility.” Kamilah Taylor, the Head of Financial Products Engineering at Gusto said this. She and her team also said many other interesting things about Runway and Gusto’s release process. Read our case study with Gusto to find out what those things were.

Runway featured feature

Runway’s release scheduling has helped many teams accelerate their release cycles, whether from ad hoc to monthly, monthly to biweekly, or biweekly to weekly. Many teams stop here, as weekly seems to be a sweet spot for mobile.

But some teams like to push the boundaries, especially once they have a framework like Runway in place, supporting smoother release cycles end to end – and enabling any number of releases per week.

In your release schedule settings, you can choose the  “Weekly (or more)” option and configure multiple sets of kickoff, submit, and release target dates. For example, you could have your first weekly cycle kick off on Monday afternoons, submit on Wednesday afternoons, and release on Friday mornings, and your second weekly cycle kick off on Wednesday mornings, submit on Friday afternoons, and release on Monday mornings. Aside from establishing your cadence and having Runway manage the schedule for you, you can, of course, optionally tie automations to each of those targets to have Runway run your releases on autopilot.

Events

Runway’s WWDC Eve party returns this Saturday! 🎉

Rumor has it that Steve Wozniak soldered his first circuit board over a plate of onion rings at the Duke of Edinburgh pub in Cupertino. Did we start this rumor? Yes. Is it true? Probably not, but who are we to say what Woz was or was not up to in the late 1970s.

Join the Runway team at this site of such great historical significance on June 7th at 6:30pm for drinks, snacks, and good mobile company.

RSVP to join us

The Duke of Edinburgh is directly across the street from Apple Park, making it one of approximately three things you can walk to from there. Join us!
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This newsletter is at an end, but your weekend is only just now beginning. Kick back with the Flight Deck archive and go on a journey through almost two years of mobile software development history