How do you usually test new features on mobile devices in your company? In the company i work, when i started, the programmers would install everytime a new build on my devices and then i would test the features. But that proved to be inefficient,as i would end up giving them my devices 10 times a day. Then i installed gitlab and android studio and i would pull code in my devices from seperate issue-branches for testing. But that is also inefficient as this method does not cover iOS devices (i don’t have a mac) and i end up doing the same, though for iOS only which again is time consuming. I would like to know please what is the best practice for this situation? Should i use any tool for that? One programmer says it would be best to send me directly urls for build downloading which would cover both iOS and Android but we are not sure if its plausible. Any suggestions would be most welcome!
Hello, not sure there is an easy answer to this but I have some insight.
(Not what I currently do at work); but you could have Hockey App/ or similar and the builds could be sent to there for both iOS and Android. You could have a build server (Jenkins maybe) which you can ‘kick off’ to make new builds from the latest merged code. (Wouldn’t work for feature branched code). There is a section on Hockey app to show you details like note for the feature etc.
We currently use Test Flight for iOS, and a Mac min as a build server. However this isn’t proving to the best method.
I have a Mac, so I can build manually, to device and simulator.
Hope that helps
Hi Dimitrios,
At the moment in my company we use Bitrise https://www.bitrise.io it’s a CI/CD platform for mobile devices. You can create workflow with specific setup, for example with every push to development the workflow is triggered. And you can as well setup that in the end of the workflow you will get your .apk or .ipa file that you can just download. A nicer feature that you can log in into bitrise from the phone and you can download/install the .ipa or .apk directly to/ from the device.
If you have any question regarding this setup just let me know, I will explain more if needed.
Thank you very much Ion. I am on to try your setup with the “Free” plan and see how it goes.
Regarding the “Developer” plan do you think it will be ok?
We are a 5 member team - 3 devs and 2 testers.
Wondering if the developers will be able to push specific branches for testing without merging to dev.
I think you can configure the workflows as you wish and setup like so to get from every workflow a .apk or .ipa . It’s not necessarily on push to Dev, this is how we do. You can also integrate your unit test and you will know if you can start testing this feature/branch.
Regarding the plan is all up to you. What are you need how your team is working and so on. And also if you gonna find use from bitrise.
We used MS App center (I guess Hockey Apps is now part of App center). We had beta builds for Android and iOS which I could download on any device. Testflight for iOS which is good to test release before it goes on App Store.
