August has been a slow news month for mobile software development. I just searched Google for “mobile news August” and all it gave me was recent weather reports for Mobile, Alabama. If you perform a similar search, it’d probably help to make it a little more specific. Or instead, you could read the rest of this month’s edition of The Flight Deck.  

Each and every month we bring you memes that are so smart they’ll make you feel like an imposter, articles showing how humans who write code can more easily catch common mistakes, looks at new features we’ve recently shipped, and confident claims like, “AI will never build your app, and your releases will never be fully automated.”

Read on for this month’s highlights.

Posts we liked

Shopify is open sourcing Tophat

If you’re unfamiliar, Tophat is Shopify’s internal, one-click mobile testing app. The name is a reference to their long running tradition of posting the tophat emoji when approving a PR to indicate not only that the code had been reviewed but that it had also been tested locally to ensure it worked as expected (a process referred to by Shopify as “tophatting”). Tophat simplifies local testing by eliminating the need to constantly stash changes, switch branches, and wait for Xcode or Android Studio to build a project. Read how.

The meme that gave this Swift developer imposter syndrome

Jacob Bartlett explains why a Vince McMahon meme he saw on Twitter made him feel imposter syndrome and then provides an in-depth guide to the type attributes within the meme that were responsible for giving him that feeling. Read this article and you will never even get the chance to feel like an imposter about type attributes in Swift.

Android accessibility checklist

Eeva-Jonna Panula is currently getting her second Masters degree for fun (your definition of fun may vary). As part of her recent thesis, she created a detailed checklist that you can follow to make sure your Android app is fully accessible. It won’t 100% guarantee you’ll catch everything, but it’s about as thorough a checklist as you’ll find.

Mobile engineers write code, and mobile engineers make mistakes

A significant benefit of compiled languages like Swift and Kotlin is that the compiler catches some of your mistakes and cuts down on the number of bugs you’re shipping. But the compiler can’t catch everything. Many simple values are so common that the compiler isn’t going to notice if you, for example, provide the wrong identifier for a function or class. Jacob Zivan looks at how to better catch these easy-to-make mistakes.  

Writing great release notes doesn’t need to be hard
How many times have you read release notes that say “bug fixes and performance improvements” and nothing else? How many times have you written release notes like that? Eli Perkins sees this as a missed opportunity. Read how he and the GitHub Mobile team wrote guidelines that empowered release captains to write informative and consistent notes that give customers a look into all the work going into polishing and improving their app.

Posts we wrote

AI will never build your app and your releases will never be fully automated

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 building complex apps and systems. AI and automation are tools that we can wield, not magic spells that can create any idea we have.

What should you do when something goes wrong with your mobile app, besides panic?

No matter how well you prepare, how thoroughly you test, and how carefully you roll out, there will come a day — perhaps an otherwise beautiful Saturday afternoon — when your on-call engineer will get paged because your app is crashing for 20% of users. What now?

How to automate uploading assets using the App Store Connect API  

Manually uploading screenshots and other assets to App Store Connect can be a tedious, error-prone process (unless you’re using Runway), especially if you regularly change them between versions or have many localizations to support. Pol Piella walks through how to use the App Store Connect API to automate these uploads.  

Runway featured feature

App store reviews can provide a valuable window into your app’s health, highlighting issues that might not otherwise surface in crash reports, observability data, or product analytics. But it can be challenging to leverage those reviews. If you have a lot of users there are simply too many reviews to sift through, and no matter how many users you have there’s still lots of noise that has nothing to do with the app’s functionality – “Terrible customer service”, “My order was late”, etc.

But with Runway’s new AI-powered user review analysis, you can catch even more kinds of app issues faster.  

We use AI to analyze all of your incoming app store reviews and identify common issues mentioned in them, surfacing these issues (alongside specific examples pulled directly from the reviews) on each release’s Rollout page. Simply evaluating for sentiment isn’t enough, since that would include reviews which have nothing to do with the app, so Runway considers the context of your company and app in order to single out bugs and broken functionality.

AI may not be able to build your app, but it can do a good job combing through your user reviews.

Events

We had a great time at two Runway happy hours this month. If you were at either of our events in Copenhagen on August 15th and in NYC on August 22nd, thanks for being there!
If you missed out, there’s more to come in September. Find us at:

• NSSpain in Logroño on September 18 and 19
• droidcon NYC in, you guessed it, NYC on September 19 and 20
• Swift Connection in Paris on September 23 and 24

We hope to see you at one or more of these! We’ll likely also host a happy hour or two alongside these conferences, so be on the lookout for an invite.

That’s all for this week’s newsletter. If you're like to read more, visit our archiveof previous Flight Decks.