Last year, we delayed our November newsletter because of American Thanksgiving. We didn’t want to interrupt anyone’s turkey or tofurkey feast with mobile news. This year, we’re barreling right in. Which is better: musings on the Android 16 developer preview or tiptoeing around politics with your family? We rest our case. Of course, feel free to read this email while eating cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes.  Â
Each and every month, regardless of whatever holidays or feasts might be happening around the world, we bring you guides to testing the untestable, answers to questions you’re likely to be asked as part of an engineering interview, recordings of in-depth panel discussions that we hosted, and posts detailing how to set up your mobile release rotation.
Read on for this month’s highlights.
Posts we liked
Random musings on the Android 16 Developer Preview 1
Isn't it a little early for the Android 16 Developer Preview to be released? It is, but that’s only because Android 16 will arrive earlier than usual in 2025 (and 2026 and 2027 and every year after that). Google used to ship a single release in Q3 of each year, but going forward, they’ll be releasing twice per year: one major release in Q2 and a minor one later on. Here’s a sneak peek of 2025’s first release. Â
Thinking about building an LLM-powered app? Before you do so, maybe give some thought to how you’d go about testing something that, by its very nature, is meant to be able to “think” and generate ideas and take actions on its own. Users will enter inputs you never considered and interact with your app in ways that didn’t occur to you – and the LLM will take that and really run with it. The potential for chaos is high. Allen Pike walks us through the four phases of automated evaluations for LLM-powered features.
The nine Android developer interview questions you should know
Maybe you’re very happy with your job and would never consider taking an interview elsewhere at any time soon. If that’s you, you can skip right over this post and read the rest of this newsletter. But if you’re an Android developer and thinking of jumping over to a new role, look at Jaewoong Eum’s in-depth guide to the nine most common questions that tend to come up repeatedly in Android dev interviews.
Why OpenFeature is central to modern feature management
OpenFeature is an open source, vendor agnostic feature-flagging API. Why do we need this? To end vendor lock-in, smooth over integration challenges, and fix the adoption issues caused by the proprietary SDKs that every current feature flagging solution relies upon. How does OpenFeature accomplish these things? Robert Kimani of LeadDev gets into the details.
Finalists announced for the 2024 App Store Awards
Step aside, Conan O’Brien and the Oscars. The biggest awards event in apps (well, tied for the biggest with Google’s event) is coming, and Apple just announced 45 finalists for Gaming, iPhone, iPad, Watch, Vision Pro, and Cultural Impact. If you’re looking for a new favorite app or game, there’s bound to be one among these selections.
There’s always room for one more.
Posts we wrote
Automate GitHub tasks with GitHub CLI in Actions workflows
Runway’s own Pol Piella built an automation for the appstoreconnect-swift-sdk library that keeps an eye out for new versions of the App Store Connect OpenAPI and automatically updates the SDK’s code when a newer spec is available. What if you wanted to make your own automation like this? Well, you can! Read his walkthrough (posted to his blog in this case, not ours) showing how you too can automate GitHub tasks in a similar way with GitHub Actions and the GitHub CLI.
The whys and hows of setting up a mobile release rotation
Mobile releases don’t have to be shouldered by a single person or small group of SMEs using hidden know-how to make the whole thing run. With adequate preparation, support, and the right resources in hand, any mobile engineer (or even a PM or someone from QA or a new employee who started a couple of weeks ago) should be able to lead a release. If you use Runway, your team already has a sturdy framework for this, but if you don’t…
Flight Deck meetups: monitoring and taking action on release health
Last week, we hosted a meetup at Sentry HQ in the San Francisco Financial District. This was on the first day of a bomb cyclone that was blowing through the area, but folks still braved the weather to hear from Akanksha Gupta (DoorDash), Ty Smith (Uber), Neil Manvar (Sentry), and Gabriel Savit (Runway, of course) about holistically monitoring release health and running better rollouts.
Featured feature
What if you could chase down pending work that’s blocking (or may at some point block) a release without doing any chasing at all? You can! Obviously, since we’d never ask a question like that if the answer wasn’t yes.
The Feature Readiness view in Runway is designed to give your team a crystal-clear picture of all the pending—and completed—work expected to ship with a given release. Visualizing incomplete work and potential blockers is helpful, but you still need to ensure all of this work gets done.
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So to help you quickly follow up on outstanding items and make sure your releases stay on schedule, we include a “Ping all pending owners” action as part of our Feature Readiness step. When you click the button to ping, Runway will send a notification into Slack or Teams tagging the respective owners of the code and/or project management tickets associated with the pending work. They will see this and snap right into action (probably).
Events
December is a very quiet time for conferences, happy hours, and other mobile engineering events. That means that for the first time since February we have no upcoming events to announce. But we’re excited to get back out on the trail in the new year. Â
That’s all for this month. We’ll see you back here right before 2024 is out. If you wish you had something else to read sooner than that, be sure to check out our archive.
