The “fold” has been an ever-present form factor throughout history. Books, magazines, and newspapers fold to put away. Clothes fold to go into a dresser. Your legs fold to let you crouch down. Pizza folds to go into your mouth (depending where you’re from). Wallets fold to fit into pockets or purses, yet our phones do not fold to fit there. Or at least they didn’t until this year. Besides the several models of Android foldable phones already on the market, rumors of the iPhone Fold have grown very loud this month. Will your app need a new foldable screen layout, something that isn’t quite tablet-sized but is larger than a normal screen? Will you need to design around a barely perceptible crease? This will all be revealed at a time of Apple’s choosing.
Whether you read our newsletter on an outdated unbendable phone like a medieval peasant or a bold, futuristic folding phone like a character from Cyberpunk 2077, the Flight Deck is here to share articles that discuss how to build great apps with SwiftUI, consider why AI productivity gains aren’t higher, and look at best practices for visibility, coordination, and scale when managing your mobile releases.
Posts we liked
Google Play’s new billing and app store changes: what developers need to know
A “new era for choice and openness" has, according to Google, officially begun. On June 30th, Google will begin shipping an enormous update to the Play Store that will let developers offer their own billing options alongside Play Store billing, provide a new pricing model with lower fees for in-app purchases, and launch a new Registered App Stores program that will make it easier than ever to install more stuff on an Android device while potentially giving developers numerous other distribution channels to worry about. This will also end Google’s long-running dispute with Epic Games, which had been part of Epic’s omnidirectional lawsuit against everyone on Earth.
Apple overhauls its app developer platform with 100 new metrics, more tools
Google isn’t alone in announcing updates to its developer ecosystem. Apple also just announced big updates to App Store Connect that include 100 new metrics tied to user behavior and monetization, which fills a gap that several third-party apps have been trying to fill with their own estimates (which are unlikely to be as accurate as Apple’s own data). There will be options for digging into this new data within App Store Connect itself and an API for exporting the data out to your own tools to examine them there. Â
Why aren’t AI productivity gains higher?
When “they” (AI VCs and investors) proclaimed that AI could turn any engineer into a 10x engineer, they appear to have made a slight typo and intended to type 1.1x engineer, in that AI makes every engineer 10% more efficient. This is genuinely good! But why haven’t efficiency gains yet been as high as people with a vested interest previously claimed? Abi Noda interviewed numerous engineers to find out why, and this is what they told them.
SwiftUI foundations: build great apps with SwiftUI
Apple recently hosted a webinar on building great apps with SwiftUI. It lasted 3 hours, mostly because Apple developers answered 100+ audience questions in detail. To hear these questions and their answers, you could track down the session recording and sit there passively listening. Or you could spring into action and click the link above to read Anton Gubarenko’s detailed transcript covering every question from the audience and every answer from Apple.
Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
Will AI kill all knowledge jobs and see us admonished to “learn to plumb”? It may depend entirely on the level of complementarity of what AI is doing. It’s a lot harder to make work so irrelevant that it’s no longer really necessary, than it is to simply automate it. Will AI just be an AEM (automated engineer machine), or will it cause an iPhone-level paradigm shift in how we engage with the concept of work? David Oks digs into why the iPhone had an impact that the ATM did not, and why AI feels more like the ATM.
One reason AI productivity gains aren’t higher is that, even though AI-native teams complete 21% more tasks and merge 98% more pull requests, the time they spend on PR reviews also increases by 91% — nearly matching the amount of time they’d previously spent coding. And that’s without improving the actual quality of their code reviews, which most engineers have never really put all that much time into perfecting. Are engineers doomed to read increasingly large piles of code instead of writing it? Yes, says Ankit Jain, unless we build systems that are better at handling failure.
Go figure
Mobile teams that self-report a significant amount of investment in automation around releases also say they waste the same amount of time on low-value release busywork as teams who report little investment in automation. This “automation paradox” highlights a critical misconception: more automation doesn't automatically lead to a more mature and efficient release process. In fact, a myopic focus on automation often creates blind spots and bottlenecks in other areas that drain productivity.
Investment in automation among teams that waste a significant amount of time on low-value release busywork (6-10 hours per week)‍
Learn more in our State of Mobile Release Management report.
Posts we wrote and videos we recorded
Mobile release management: How to waste 19% less time & ship 14% faster
Managing releases across dozens of white-label apps doesn't have to be painful. Flightpaths in Runway let you track every app in flight from a single dashboard: review status, rollout progress, and health metrics at a glance, while bulk actions and automations save you from repetitive clicks. Watch this video to see how.
Mobile app release process best practices: visibility, coordination, and scale
You may have heard us say similar things in this newsletter before, but if you want your mobile release management to evolve as your team and org grow, you need to focus on establishing a consistent release cadence, assigning a named release owner at every stage, automating routine handoffs, defining clear release health metrics, planning for failure, and centralizing release knowledge in a single source of truth. Adopt these practices and your team can move from reactive, tribal-knowledge-driven releases to a predictable process that scales with your team rather than breaks under its weight.
Runway featured feature
Did you know you can configure absolute (MB) or percentage-based thresholds, and Runway will alert you if any new builds increase by that amount compared to the previous release? You can monitor download size (Apple and Google) and install size (Apple only), and, like any other notifications in Runway, you can direct these alerts to specific channels and tag user groups or individuals to make sure they get seen.
On the Apple side, you can select a specific device model to track, and you can also get notified when your bundle approaches a pre-determined threshold within Apple's 200 MB cellular download limit.
And to give teams a head start on digging into unforeseen build size increases, these alerts link to the code diff between the two builds. From there, you can choose to dive into specialized tools to analyze the delta in more detail.
Events
Spring has sprung in the Northern Hemisphere, and so have all the events we’ve been mentioning over the past couple of Flight Deck editions; they'll be here before we know it. Come see us at:
- Android Makers (Paris) - April 9-10
- try! Swift Tokyo - April 12-14
- Deep Dish Swift (Chicago) - April 12-14
We'll also be returning to WWDC with a pre-event party on June 6th. Details and RSVP links to come in the next edition of the Flight Deck.
If you don’t plan to be in Paris, Tokyo, Chicago, then you can join us virtually on May 28th for our Build vs Buy panel discussion. Every mobile team eventually faces this question: do we keep building and maintaining our own release tooling, or do we invest in something purpose-built? This panel will share how they made their own calls.
Also, is there anyone capable of multi-phase, dimensional shifting that will allow them to attend both try! Swift Tokyo and Deep Dish Swift? We’ll find out on April 12th! Until then, you can relax with one of our previous 30 newsletters.
