Another year is just about behind us. Can you believe it? Remember last year? Remember 2012? Remember the 90s? Remember 1874? Remember 2000 BCE? Seems like only yesterday Pharaoh Mentuhotep II was reuniting Egypt, establishing his divinity for generations to come and now here we are entering 2025, a time of self-driving cars and AI that can almost generate an image that looks kinda ok.
Each and every month, as time continues its endless march forward, we bring you guides to implementing rollbacks on mobile, considerations of how Meta thinks about Threads’ performance on iOS, looks at how teams behind chart-topping apps like PrizePicks scaled their releases using Runway, how you can support your customers generating an image that looks kinda ok using Apple Intelligence.
Read on for this month’s highlights.
Posts we liked
Measuring the cost of production issues on development teams
Every org would love to focus on quality while also shipping new features quickly, without ballooning costs. But there’s a well known saying about this: you can have it cheap, you can have it fast, or you can have it good — pick two. Most teams choose to ship fast while keeping costs under control. This can lead to costly issues concerning both stability and velocity. Just how costly? David Tran’s now ROI calculator will show you exactly how high a cost your team is paying.
How Reddit improved app startup speed by 50% using baseline profiles and R8
Reddit’s Android app has been around for a long time — since April of 2016, to be specific (that may feel like a short time ago, but it’s been NINE YEARS). Their mobile team has implemented countless performance upgrades over this time, and all the low-hanging optimization fruit has long since been picked. So how exactly did they manage to improve app startup speed by a remarkable 50%? Ben Weiss and Lauren Darcy walk through the specifics of how they did so.
Enhance Xcode previews with unit test coverage
Previews can unexpectedly break or crash, and it’s really not fun to debug your previews before you can get around to debugging your actual code. Xcode doesn’t have a built-in way to test that your previews will not crash, but our friends over at Emerge Tools have put together a guide to getting around that by writing a unit test that performs a layout pass of all previews using Emerge’s open-source SnapshotPreviews Swift Package.
How Meta thinks about Threads’ iOS performance
Back in 2023, Threads became the fastest growing app in the history of mobile, gaining 100 million users in five days after Elon bought Twitter and turned it into X, the everything app. While Threads’ growth has slowed significantly since then, they still have 275,000,000 MAU and the team puts enormous effort into user experience. Dave LaMacchia and Jason Patterson dig into how they measure performance to ensure their user experience is good user experience.
Exploring Apple Intelligence: image generation
In the opening up above, I mentioned that AI can almost generate an image that looks ok and I was thinking specifically of Apple Intelligence when I wrote that. Apple’s new generative AI tools are a mixed bag of things they’re still figuring out (using Image Wand to generate pictures that don’t have that weird AI sheen to them) to fun tools that already work well (Genmoji). Developers have access to these tools for use in their own apps and Antonella Giugliano walks through how to take advantage of them.
Posts we wrote
Rollbacks on mobile: yes, they’re possible and this is why you need them
With robust observability tools in place, teams can monitor the health of their deployments in real time, quickly identify issues, and then automate a rollback process when intractable problems arise. Wait a second… automate a rollback process? You can’t roll a mobile release back — the nature of mobile releases makes implementing a true rollback mechanism inherently impossible. But luckily, with a little bit of effort, a close approximation to rollbacks can be achieved. Here’s how.
How PrizePicks scaled releases by getting every team member in the game with Runway
PrizePicks is the largest daily fantasy sports organization in North America and ranks as the #1 most downloaded sports app on the App Store and Play Store. We talked to Ziyan Prasla about how we helped the rapidly growing PrizePicks mobile team evolve their release process from a chaotic one that was really only designed to support a few engineers and required his expertise and experience to make work, to a mature setup that easily supports the 150+ people who contribute to their apps.
Runway Wrapped 2024
Somehow another year of mobile releases is almost behind us! Maybe your team is already in a holiday code freeze, or you have one coming up soon. Even if you're powering through a final release or two of the year, we thought now would be a good time to look back at 2024 and everything you shipped.
Before we all look ahead to next year, here's a recap of 2024 in mobile releases!
🗓
About 55% of teams released biweekly, while 31% maintained a speedy weekly cadence. Normal releases took around 8 days from kickoff to release.
🚨
Teams averaged 1 hotfix for every 2 normal releases. And when hotfixes were required, they made it out the door in 2 days.
🎁
156 commits were made and 16 tickets were closed in the average release.
⚙️
Teams built an average of 5 release candidates per release, with 17% of builds failing.
📣
Teams changed up their app store release notes for 40% of releases.
🔍
On the Apple side of the house, an average submission spent 11 hourswaiting for review and 3 hours in review. Submissions were rejected 9% of the time.
Runway featured feature
You no longer have to wait until the end of the year to get an email about your org’s releases. With Runway’s new biweekly release digest emails, any member of your Runway organization can get a regular email containing key info about your live, next-up, and upcoming releases for all apps delivered straight to their email inbox.
These emails include things like adoption stats across live versions, detailed stability and observability metrics as configured in Runway, info about release schedules and timing, an overview of pending and completed work and fixes, upcoming release pilots, and direct links into Runway for each release in question. Email has rarely been so useful.
Events
All last year we traveled around the world (well, around the Americas and Europe) to conferences, events, and happy hours to talk to mobile engineers about why their releases need to be managed. You may have even met some of us at one of these events or drank with us at one of our happy hours.
But we rarely get more than a few minutes to really dig into why mobile release management is so important, which is why next month we’re hosting an in-depth webinar with Pol Piella to take a closer look at why your mobile releases need to be managed.
Between error-prone manual steps, constant context switching, and that one engineer who holds all the ‘secrets,’ mobile releases have become an invisible drain on your team’s time and resources. As your app scales, so does the complexity and the cost—slowly eating into efficiency, budgets, and your ability to deliver at speed.
RSVP to join us and learn more
You’ve reached the end of this email and thus, as far as we’re concerned, the end of the year. Go have some champagne or egg nog or a big glass of water to celebrate another year in the books.
