Today’s edition marks the second full year of the Flight Deck. Thanks again for joining us for the ride and opening these newsletters often enough that we sometimes stop and think, “I can’t believe thousands of people read our claim that Steve Wozniak built the first Apple I computer while eating mashed potatoes.” We plan to send the Flight Deck for many years to come, and over the decades, this anniversary date may become a major holiday like Halloween or Arbor Day.

As well it should, since every single edition of the Flight Deck brings you guides to AI code model evals, thoughtful articles about engineers almost (but not quite) being fired from Apple, and details on how companies like Skyscanner were able to double their release velocity and unlock new growth opportunities (is it with the support of tooling like Runway? I bet it is, but you can only find out by continuing).

Read on for this month’s highlights.

Posts we liked

From weekly manual slogs to rapidfire releases

We’re not the only people out here talking about mobile release management. Dotan Tamir, Lead iOS Engineer at Tilt (formerly Empower), wrote up a great piece describing his team's journey towards mobile release excellence. They were already in pretty good shape, releasing more or less weekly while keeping things relatively stable and scaling the team, but Dotan and team didn't accept that status quo. They noticed that lack of predictability and discipline around releases was negatively impacting the org and so they set about maturing further, eventually achieving a twice-weekly release train that takes only a few minutes per release.

The coming disruption of Apple developer tooling

There’s not a lot of innovation in Apple devtools. You’d think there would be, since there’s a big market for them, but several things are holding them back: Apple has a lot of control over the ecosystem, anything a third party might do requires reverse-engineering proprietary technologies that could suddenly change at the next WWDC, and the market is not quite big enough to overcome those first two issues. But there is one area where this is all rapidly changing: CI. Pedro Piñera of Tuist explains why.

An engineer's guide to AI code model evals

Continuing our recent Flight Deck trend, we’re sharing another article about using AI to do something useful for you as an engineer. What happened to all our snarkiness about AI? Well, it turns out that a Waymo I often take around town reads the newsletter, and we hurt its feelings with all the jokes. Oh, also, in this in-depth article, Addy Osmani of Google explores what evals are, how they’re useful, and how you can start doing them.

A journey with KSP and KotlinPoet

Muhammad Mehdi created Kombinator as a way to generate all possible variations of a Kotlin data class’s parameters. Is this something you’d find valuable? You’re in luck, since in this post he shares direct access to Kombinator and describes in detail how he built it using KSP and KotlinPoet. Who knew you could automate something without using an LLM? I’ll ask my Waymo if this very minor joke is being too rude about AI later.

The first time I was almost fired at Apple

There is no shame in almost being fired from Apple. Steve Jobs was fully fired from Apple, and he is widely seen as the greatest Apple employee of all time. Read how John Calhoun came very close to getting the axe while building what would turn out to be the modern macOS color picker (it was so good that it was ported over to Mac OS X after Apple bought NeXT, even though it was designed for OS 9 and Steve was throwing a lot of the old stuff away).

Go figure

Did you know that despite the significant amount of time, money, and tooling that larger mobile teams invest in their releases, many teams (51%) view their processes as just "somewhat" efficient, 38% consider them not efficient at all, and only 11% view their processes as actually efficient.

This isn’t surprising, given that over half of these teams (52%) also report spending about a third of each release cycle on non-productive or low-value tasks, which is a clear sign that inefficiency has simply been normalized.  It’s like having a terrible work commute for years. You just get used to it, but that doesn’t make it good!

Teams have acclimated to release friction, making it harder to build internal advocacy for solving a problem many don’t fully recognize as a problem – despite a clear and quantifiable impact on DevEx and release velocity.

If you’d like to learn more about this and other challenges currently faced by mobile engineers on teams worldwide, check out our 2025 State of Mobile Release Management Report.

Posts we wrote and customers who told stories about us

How Skyscanner doubled release velocity and unlocked new growth opportunities

Learn what inspired Skyscanner iOS engineer Nicholas Frugoni to say, “Before Runway, we spent hours per week just managing releases. Some weeks, we could spend two days trying to unblock things. Now, releases mostly just run in the background.” And why, when the team replaced their old process and unreliable internal release tooling with Runway, they were so happy that they bought a cake to celebrate.

The hidden and not-so-hidden costs of inefficient mobile releases

In terms of relative effort, releasing app updates feels like it shouldn’t be that big a deal. The hard work of planning, designing, building, and testing your new version is essentially complete at that point. But an inefficient release process automatically makes you more inefficient at building your product, too. Some of these inefficiencies cost you in obvious ways (you’re not shipping as quickly as you could be) and in hidden ways (you’re quietly building up technical debt that you’re going to have to deal with someday). What exactly does a bad (or ‘just OK’) release process cost you?

Runway featured feature

We’re late to MCP, but first in helping mobile teams avoid being late.

We recently unlocked a powerful new way to integrate with Runway. Point your agent of choice to our MCP server and ask questions like "What's our next scheduled release?", "How healthy is our latest app version?", and "Which team members are part of the Checkout user group?"

You can also tell your agent to "Update the current release's regression testing status to ‘passed’", "Add 'Here's what to test' as tester notes on our latest nightly bucket build", or "Complete the 'Sync with marketing' checklist item for our next iOS release.”

While you’re at it, you could try to hit it with a “Make our app #1 in the app store charts” or “Ensure only good reviews and 5 star reviews are submitted for our app.” YMMV. And your app already has great reviews, so you don’t need to worry about this anyway.

Events

Looking for Runway? Here’s where you can find us in the coming months:

• NSSpain in Logroño from September 17th to 19th
• droidcon Berlin from September 24th to 26th  

We’re not hosting a happy hour in Logroño because cheap, good wine flows through the streets there, but we are hosting a happy hour in Berlin and we’d love to see you there. If you’re not going to droidcon and you’re not in Berlin, you can just have a drink at home and give us a little toast when you do.

With that, the 24th Flight Deck has come to a close. Take a walk down memory lane and read one of our previous 23 editions.