This is the 25th edition of our newsletter. Last month was the 24th edition. The month before that was the 23rd. Is this boring? Are we limiting ourselves with this kind of linear thinking? Maybe we should run the 75th edition next and the 43rd edition after that (wait until you hear about the liquid metal designs going into iOS 28). THEY want us to believe that the past happened back then and the present is right now and the future is happening later. But we don’t have to follow THEIR rules.

No matter where in time you currently live, every single edition of the Flight Deck brings you examinations of whether people really want to use AI tools or are being forced to do so, the hidden costs of mobile releases, announcements from Apple, and examinations of whether or not people’s bosses are making them use AI tools.

Read on for this month’s highlights.

Posts we liked

From chaos to calm: revamping mobile releases at Turo

Friday is typically regarded as the best day of the work week. But the opposite was true at Turo. They release their Android and iOS apps on Fridays and, in order to reach the weekend, they were having to contend with endless checklists for coordinating manual tasks, hours of QA, and hotfixes that wreaked merge conflict havoc, resulting in approximately 12 hours of total engineering time wasted per week (six hours per app). Learn how Turo now ships every week without drama, turning a fragile, fraught process into a calm, easy one.

So, you want to be a mobile platform engineer?

Which of these questions sounds more interesting to you: "How do I build this feature?" or "How do I help the entire team build features faster?" If it’s the second question, you may want to become a mobile platform engineer (if you’re not already). Tjeerd In T’Veen examines the reasons why that may be and then outlines the best ways to actually become a Platform Engineer, from writing solid documentation to rewriting flaky tests.

Are people’s bosses really making them use AI tools?

There’s a famous rule at IBM: “A computer can never be held accountable, so a computer must never make a management decision.” To a lot of engineering managers, though, it sure seems that computers can do everything else these days. At this point, most developers have embraced AI as another tool that can help them do their jobs better, but are some companies taking this way too far? Andy Bell spoke to several different software engineers to find out.  

A new layer of security for certified Android devices

Google doesn’t just want Android to be open; they also want it to be secure so that when a user downloads a random app, it doesn’t inject malware into their Samsung phone. That’s why, starting next year, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed by users on certified Android devices - first in a small number of test countries like Brazil and then globally in 2027. Find out how you can get early access and be ready for this change.

Apple announces new iPhones, Watches, and AirPods

There was nothing too unexpected coming out of Apple’s latest event (still no iCar or iPlane), but there was still big news in the form of AirPods that are capable of acting as a universal translator during live conversations (assuming these work well, this is legitimately huge news), the first colorful iPhone Pro ever made, and a new iPhone Air that’s very light and thin in traditional Apple Air fashion.

Go figure

We originally saw this back in March on Twitter (I’m sorry, I mean X, the Everything App where we’ll all be doing our banking no later than 2024) but then someone shared it on Slack yesterday and made it feel new again.

This is how we do our versioning. Is it how you do yours?

Posts we wrote and customers who told stories about us

[Live event] Mobile DevEx: the hidden cost of releases

Despite significant investment in automation, mobile engineers still lose ⅓ of their release cycles to busywork, coordination overhead, and firefighting (remember earlier in this newsletter when we talked about what Turo used to go through every Friday?). In this live discussion on Oct 9th at 1pm ET, experts from Runway, Sentry, and leading mobile teams will unpack why automation hasn’t solved release pain, how constant firefighting affects both morale and velocity, and what steps you can take to improve DevEx around releases.

[New site] State of Mobile Release Management report

We usually feature data from this report in the Go Figure section, but that space is occupied this month. Plus, we’ve now made all the findings from our State of Mobile Release Management report publicly available through an in-depth new mini site. Discover how much time the average team is spending in each release cycle, where their biggest frustrations are, and how you can turn efficiency into a competitive advantage.  

Runway featured feature

Teams use Runway’s checklist and approval items to capture parts of their release process that can’t or shouldn’t be automated — e.g., manual actions or updates that different team members need to take care of throughout a release.

These kinds of actions often need to be taken at specific moments. You may have a reminder that needs to go out three days before kickoff, and simply having a corresponding checklist item on your Kickoff step doesn’t make that very clear.

There’s a better way: now, you have the ability to attach explicit timing to your checklist and approval items.

For example, you could make an item due “two days before kickoff”, “at submission time”, or “one hour after release”. When you attach timing to an item, that timing is surfaced clearly in Runway as a visual reference, and it can also power optional reminder notifications that fire if a deadline arrives and the corresponding item hasn’t been marked complete.

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  
• SwiftLeeds from October 7th to 8th

Europe is where it’s at and where we’re at. We’re even holding our next team offsite in Finland between droidcon and SwiftLeeds. Come on, US! Get your act together and host more mobile engineering events.  Assuming that visitors can still enter the country...

With that, the 25th Flight Deck has come to a close. Take a walk down memory lane and read one of our previous 24 editions.