Welcome to the fifth edition of The Flight Deck, Runway’s monthly newsletter about mobile engineering and release management.  Last month’s newsletter was a week late because of Thanksgiving, this month’s newsletter is a week early because something tells us you may have more enjoyable things to do than check your email later this month.  

Each and every month we bring you perspectives on scaling your mobile team, juggling extra work even without scaling your mobile team, keeping mobile team members happy, and just having an all-around better experience shipping mobile apps.

Read on for this month’s highlights. 

Posts we liked 

The art of streamlining mobile releases at Mercari
How does Mercari manage pain-free, high-confidence releases at scale? This piece by Francesco Pretelli on the Mercari engineering blog highlights the three must-haves for his Android and iOS teams: a solid process, the right tools, and a squad of tech masterminds making sure everything runs smoothly. Look out for a surprise cameo by the mobile release management platform that Francesco says should be considered "the superhero of coordination.”

Safeguarding against WebView vulnerabilities in Android applications

In Android development, WebViews can serve as a useful tool, allowing you to quickly and seamlessly add new functionality to native apps by integrating web content. But doing this also introduces risks that developers have to address. You may use WebViews sparingly (if ever), but if and when you do, you'll want to be sure you do so securely! Joseph James guides us through the threats WebViews can pose, and practical strategies to bolster security.

The iOS SwiftUI Accessibility Techniques open source project

Apple does not currently provide extensive or detailed documentation offering guidance on how to build accessible apps using their frameworks. That’s why CVS Health and Paul J Adam have started up an open source project —  called iOS SwiftUI Accessibility Techniques — with the goal of demonstrating accessibility-minded approaches using good and bad examples that can be tested with VoiceOver and other assistive technologies in iOS.

Apple’s best apps and games of 2023 

Here are Apple’s picks for best apps and games of the year, split across the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and even Mac. The best iOS app is AllTrails, an app that’s so useful that it encourages you to look at your phone even while hiking in the woods.

Google’s best apps and games of 2023

Not to be outdone, Google also put together a list of their own best apps and games of the year. Did you know there’s a Bumble dedicated app for making friends? Now you do. It won Google’s best app for “fun”, which makes sense as making friends is usually fun. 

Posts we wrote 

The Runway year in review

All of us at Runway are still hard at work right now, which means our full year isn’t quite ready to be reviewed. But 2023 is close enough to being done that we’d like to take you on a trip down memory lane (memory taxiway?) to look back at the features we shipped and some of the other other things we got up to in 2023. It was a big year for us and 2024 will be even bigger! 

What even is iOS code signing?
Code signing is a crucial security feature in the Apple ecosystem. While you certainly don't need to master every code signing detail to be able to develop your apps, knowing a little bit of PKI and how it's used in practice can come in handy both for debugging iOS-related signing issues and for better understanding the modern internet. That’s why Brunco Rocha wrote this explainer. 

How VSCO uses Runway to save hours of engineering work with each release

At VSCO, mobile releases worked alright when they had the dedicated bandwidth of a release manager… until suddenly they didn’t have one anymore. Henry Ly details how Runway now provides VSCO with a single source of truth to manage their entire release process, greatly improve collaboration, and automates away busywork that previously required tons of open tabs and context-switching.

Featured feature

What if you could instantly resolve a critical issue in prod, with a single click? Now, you can. Runway automatically re-signs your last live production build and preps it for a possible rollback release — including preemptive submission for review on iOS — to remove all possible sources of stress and delay.

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Watch our 20 minute, on-demand demo session to learn how you can use Rollbacks to avoid all the mess that comes with a bad release. Click the button below and watch it whenever you like.  

[Watch it now]

Upcoming events 

Runway has no upcoming events for the remainder of 2023 other than visiting with family and friends during this holiday season. We hope you and your team have the opportunity to do the same! We’ll see you back here with the next edition of the Flight Deck in the new year.