Today’s edition marks one full year of The Flight Deck. Thanks for coming along with us and opening these newsletters often enough that each edition makes us think “Nice! It’s really cool that so many mobile folks read our newsletter.” We plan to send The Flight Deck out for many years to come (at least 100) and if we keep this up, future generations may start measuring their years as running from August to July. Forget the Lunar and Gregorian calendars, The Flight Deck calendar is the future. Â
Each and every month we bring you in-depth looks at how other mobile teams manage their releases, introduce you to great new blogs and newsletters, bring you highlights from recent events and conferences we’ve attended, and pose questions like: “do you know what your mobile team is shipping right now?”
Read on for this month’s highlights.
Posts we liked
Unfold's modern mobile releases & the subtle art of making them boring
Can a mobile release be boring? Can water be dry? Can a circle be a rectangle? Can a bicycle be a rocketship that takes you to the moon? Alan Cooke details how Squarespace’s Unfold team made their own releases boring: learn what these non-eventful mobile releases are like and how they came about, dig into how eventful they used to be, and hear why having uneventful releases is a superpower.
Free on-device translations with the Swift Translation API
Translation is a new CoreML framework from Apple that lets you perform on-device translations in iOS apps completely for free. Why open up your device to the security risks and costs of third party options when you can just use Apple’s Translation instead? Pol Piella shows you how.
What if there was a newsletter that didn’t link out to a bunch of articles (no offense to this newsletter) but was instead self-contained? There is at least one such Android newsletter from Google Developer Expert Vinay Gaba. In this week’s edition he (among other things) looks at how the creator of Wordle made the first version in Android in 2013 and promptly forgot about it, conducts a quick interview with Zach Klippenstein, and explains the history of the word “bug” as it relates to software.
Our App Store screenshot nightmare is (almost) over
Apple will soon require only one set of screenshots for iPhone and iPad. You heard that right, just one set. It doesn’t matter how many different screen sizes and aspect ratios users of your app might have, you’ll only have to upload the one set. Jesse Squires celebrates this change. Â
Posts we wrote
Do you know what your mobile team is shipping right now?
What’s the status of your latest mobile release? …how about now? Okay, how about now? Hmmm, what about now? Did that one engineer merge their PR yet? Is this new feature flag enabled? Did QA find any problems with the last build? Has marketing provided the new App Store metadata and screenshots you’re waiting on? Wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t have to ask and answer all these questions and everyone just knew what was going on?
Your mobile team’s knowledge and release tooling is way too distributed
Dealing with the vast amount of tools and knowledge required to release app updates is a tremendous challenge for any mobile team. Pol Piella has first hand experience with these problems. Read his thoughts on what to do when your knowledge and tooling is way too distributed. This is our second newsletter in a row with two Pol posts. You too could get mentioned twice in the newsletter if you start working here.
9 incredible WWDC 2024 highlights for mobile developers
Even though this year’s WWDC is behind us, that doesn’t mean we’ve all digested every single new update and announcement from Apple. Rudrank Riyam walks through 9 great features for mobile developers that you may have missed in the initial hubbub about cool iPad calculators and Apple Intelligence.
Runway featured feature
To continue with the screenshot theme we started with one of the articles above, let’s talk about how managing screenshots and metadata for the app stores can cause a lot of context-switching and wasted time during a release.
For one, the stores limit when you can actually update release notes and metadata for an upcoming version, which can turn this part of the process into a last minute scramble of copy-pasting and begging Product or Marketing to send you stuff.
Plus, if your app is localized, you can multiply that scramble by the number of languages you serve, with extra work to send out new metadata for translation and then pull the translations back in before submission.
Now, you can update release notes, metadata, and screenshots for upcoming releases as soon as they exist in Runway. We’ll monitor the status of the release in the store and automatically take care of syncing any updates as soon as it’s possible to do so — no manual copy-pasting required!
You can also leverage Runway’s translations integration to get a head start on metadata localization. If you opt in to have your translation integration handle metadata, each metadata field will reflect a status that shows what needs to be uploaded for translation, what’s still in the process of being translated, and what’s translated and ready for export to the app store. Whenever you’re ready, you can trigger an export of all translated metadata, which automatically syncs it to the store directly from your translations provider.
Upcoming events
We won’t be at any conferences until September, and we’ll tell you all about those in the next edition of The Flight Deck. However, we will be hosting happy hours in both New York and Copenhagen in August. If you happen to be in either place, stay on the lookout for RSVP forms we’ll be sharing in the coming days.
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That’s all for this week’s newsletter. Why not take a trip down memory lane and read our archive of the entire year of Flight Decks?
