Greetings, mortals.

It gives me devilish delight to declare that the October Flight Deck is here to terrify and scare-ify our readers with intriguing tomes and shifting scrolls about the arcane arts of mobile software engineering, with a keen focus on the rituals of mobile release management. Proceed forth to unveil more, but heed this omen: today’s newsletter is haunted by spirits of the night.

OK, we promise to (mostly) end the Halloween inspired copy there. This is the 15th edition of the Flight Deck. Each month, we bring you diaries of upgrading essential developer tools, links to detailed guides to doing app development on iPads and other devices, thoughts on how to reduce developers’ cognitive loads, video explainers filmed on roofs, and invites to upcoming Runway-hosted meetups.  

Read on for this month’s highlights… if you dare.  

Posts we liked

How a medical diagnosis improved my mobile engineering skills

There is more to being a good mobile engineer than expertise in the newest Swift or Kotlin features. Chase of JPM Technologies looks at how his diagnosis with an auto-immune disorder showed him how to think of his body as a connected system and how this has influenced how he approaches his engineering work. It’s not just coding, but your habits, work-life balance, and planning that also influence the quality of your work.

AI on Android Spotlight Week
Considering just how much time Google has put into talking about AI this year, you might think that every single week is AI on Android Spotlight Week. But it isn’t! Earlier this month, the Android Developer Blog devoted a week to sharing guides, tutorials, and videos detailing how to put cutting edge AI to use in your own Android apps.

App development on iPad

Notice how this says “on” iPad and not “for” iPad. Swift Playgrounds is Xcode’s iPad sibling. It’s a fully featured IDE that isn’t quite as functional as Xcode, but can still be used as a replacement if you don’t mind dealing with a few limitations. James Froggatt details his experience using Swift Playgrounds to do most of his coding over the past year.  

Upgrading from Android Gradle Plugin 7.4.1 to 8.5.2: A developer’s diary

Updating essential tools in Android development (or iOS development or React Native development or any form of software development whatsoever) brings with it useful new functionality and the possibility of becoming very annoyed by an unexpected problem. Ivan Dimitrov walks through his own journey updating to AGP 8.5.2.  

How does this whole preconcurrency thing work in Swift 6?

The @preconcurrency attribute provides (what should be) a simple and safe way to deal with protocol-isolation mismatches. Matt Massicotte has long found it to be confusing. In this article he sets out to fix that once and for all, laying out exactly what it does, when you should use it, and the problems you might encounter along the way. After reading this post you may or may not feel comfortable using @preconcurrency everywhere.  

Posts we wrote

How to build the perfect release train

Release trains are not a silver bullet, but they can help you ship new versions of your app more predictably, reduce risk, get feedback from users faster, and improve collaboration and planning within your team. Pol Piella walks through how to build the perfect mobile release train.

How to lighten your mobile team’s cognitive load
Mobile development will always involve some degree of manual work and coordination that can’t be automated (as we discuss in the video below) and managing the resulting mental tax on your team is critical. Too much cognitive load can lead to burnout, human error, and an overall decline in productivity. Taking the time to manage your mobile team’s cognitive load is therefore a no-brainer, which means it creates zero cognitive load!

Automation is not enough to manage your releases

Can you improve your mobile release process with automation? Sure. But no matter how many scripts you write and automations you run, it’ll never be enough. Why? Because humans collaborate on building our apps, and then other humans use those apps and poke at them and break them. These kinds of human interaction can never be automated. Richard stands on his roof and discusses why. Also, this counts as a “post we wrote” since there was a script for the video.  

Featured feature

You’ve probably experienced this kind of scenario before: someone on one side of the org spins up a new in-app event or custom product page and excitedly submits it for review in App Store Connect, completely unaware that there’s a new app version scheduled for submission shortly thereafter. When their teammates go to submit the new version, they’re met with an error explaining that they can’t proceed because other items are already submitted. A whole back-and-forth ensues to figure out what’s already submitted and what needs to be submitted, then a bunch of clicking around in App Store Connect to remove items and resubmit.  

Runway’s “unblock submission” action seamlessly resolves this kind of situation with a single click.

If Runway detects a state that is blocking your app submission, we’ll show you a button that allows you to instantly pull all blocking items from the queue or from review and then re-add each of those items alongside the build so that you can easily proceed by submitting all the items together.

Events

After a trip up to Leeds for a wonderful time at the SwiftLeeds conference earlier this month, we’re returning to the UK for droidcon London. Two different platforms, two different cities, one wonderful British Isle.

This isn’t our only upcoming event, though. On November 20th we’re co-hosting our first Flight Deck meetup at Sentry’s San Francisco HQ (you’ll recognize the meetup’s name from this newsletter, and that’s no accident). We'll be there discussing how to holistically monitor mobile release health and run better rollouts with a panel of experts, plus we’ll eat, drink, network and hang out. If you’re in the Bay Area, we’d love to have you join us.


RSVP to attend
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This is the end of this month’s newsletter. Very happy we managed to get through it without a single ghost sighting. Check out our archive for old editions of the Flight Deck; we’re pretty confident it’s not haunted.