Mobile app development is essential to businesses' survival in today's rapidly shifting digital production environment. It is quickly becoming the go-to method of app release. Organizations strive to release high-quality applications more quickly, with DevOps becoming an ever-more-common method in developing apps more than ever. In this article, we investigate its value within the mobile development context and explore practical ways, obstacles, and fixes for using DevOps pipeline within this particular field of app creation.
Companies face increasing pressure to deliver feature-rich, reliable apps to their users as mobile app usage rapidly rises. Unfortunately, traditional software development and deployment approaches often fail in today's fast-changing environment - where DevOps provides significant value through automation, continuous improvement, and collaboration.
Challenges In Mobile App Development
Below are the challenges in mobile app development for devops:
- Fragmentation: An array of mobile app ecosystem platforms (Android and iOS), device configurations, and OS versions contribute to its complexity. Such fragmentation may cause issues regarding quality consistency across devices, compatibility issues between versions or OS versions, and compatibility problems between OS versions or versions and device models.
- Frequent Updates: Users of mobile applications expect frequent updates and improvements, making coordinating these regular upgrades while keeping the app stable a formidable task without an organized DevOps process in place.
- User Expectations: Consumers hold mobile apps to high expectations regarding usability and performance, often leaving negative reviews or losing users due to minor bugs or slowdowns. Even minor defects could result in significant user loss.
- Security Concerns: Security should always be at the top of mobile app developers' agenda since mobile applications often contain sensitive user data. DevOps methodology helps facilitate this integration into the development process seamlessly.
- Speed-to-Market: Mobile users need new features and updates quickly, necessitating faster release cycles from development teams using manual procedures or conventional workflows. Unfortunately, however, developers who rely on such approaches could find this more taxing.
- App Store Compliance: App stores impose stringent guidelines for apps to be approved and available for user use; any deviation can lead to rejections or delays, with rejection being the most severe consequence.
Read More: Why Adopt DevOps? Maximize Software Development Impact with This Cost-Efficient Strategy!
Solutions With DevOps
- Automation: Automation in mobile app development is critical to maintaining consistency and speed; continuous delivery (CD) and integration (CI) pipelines play an integral part here.
- Cross-Platform Development: Cross-platform development and testing can be simplified using DevOps to ensure your app will run flawlessly across various hardware and operating systems.
- Real User Monitoring: Utilizing fundamental user monitoring tools allows organizations to gather user performance data to predict issues and take proactive measures to fix them quickly and efficiently.
- Collaboration: Collaboration among teams working on development, quality assurance, and operations will speed problem resolution and enhance the app's overall performance.
- Security Integration: Integrate security procedures like vulnerability analysis and code scanning into the DevOps process to guarantee that applications are created with safety in mind from their inception.
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Code integration, rigorous testing, and production deployment can all be automated through continuous integration/continuous deployment pipelines for maximum stability while permitting frequent releases.
- Testing: Automated testing across devices and operating systems allows developers to detect compatibility problems early, decreasing the chance of bugs after release.
- Monitoring and Feedback: Monitoring an app's performance over time makes it possible to quickly detect and address performance issues, while future versions could benefit from user input and enhance overall quality.
Mobile App Development CI/CD
Let me introduce CarRent Mobile's fully automated CI/CD pipeline. Please allow me to run through some key elements of this solution with you.
Distributed Version Control with Git
CarRent switched from Subversion to Git, simplifying parallel development for its distributed team members across the UK, Romania, Bangalore, and Hyderabad. Git can easily integrate with Slack for the automation of workflows. At the same time, the geographical dispersion allows feature branches to work concurrently before being combined back into one central unit.
Better Code Coverage And Unit Testing - Flutter
After considering three possible solutions carefully, the development team determined a brand-new mobile app user interface framework using the third-way principle. Flutter was recommended as the ideal framework, boasting extensive native experience, robust unit testing, TDD capabilities, and cross-platform Dart development (akin to Swift/Kotlin development). Flutter Static Code Analyzer allowed our team to quickly identify issues even before writing any code, using Coveralls Flutter page as an easy way of viewing overall test coverage with Flutter Cover and identifying primary, untested functionality in code while also showing code that either requires refactoring because of being either unusable or cannot be adequately tested.
Mobile Test Automation - Appium Flutter Driver
Appium Flutter Driver was chosen as a test automation framework despite Flutter's excellent integration test support due to its greater overall capability and more secure integration into mobile cloud platforms.
Mobile Cloud For Better Device Coverage - BrowserStack
Mobile applications must be tested across various mobile devices with constantly evolving configurations that change every two months. However, obtaining each of them for testing proved impossible. Using Browserstack, CarRent Mobile's team could test its applications directly on physical mobile phones without establishing and managing an internal laboratory of virtual machines or emulators.
Continuous Integration And Deployment With Microsoft App Center
CarRent used DevOps practices to successfully oversee and automate both iOS and Android app lifecycles, distribute apps to beta testers quickly, quickly connect repositories in minutes, automate builds for testing purposes on actual devices in the cloud, and track real-world usage using crash analytics data - thus speeding up their feedback loop by two additional measures of acceleration.
Integrated SDLC Management - TestRail/JIRA
CarRent could track its entire SDLC from user stories through automated and manual testing to launch, thanks to an integrated JIRA/TestRail solution.
Powerful Real-Time Crash Reporting - CrashLytics
CarRent utilized DevOps' second method for monitoring, ranking, and real-time fixing stability issues that compromise app quality. They helped identify crashes as their source and set priorities to expedite real-time feedback based on DevOps best practices.
Slack - Instant Messaging And Collaboration System On Steroids
CarRent can quickly implement an efficient communications process through Slack's integration with various DevOps tools to guarantee better collaboration.
Three Steps For Using DevOps In The Creation Of Mobile Apps
To successfully use the DevOps team to create mobile applications for your company, you must follow three essential steps. For a thorough discussion on each step, refer to this section.
Continue to Plan and Integrate to Complete the Project Scope
An effective mobile app development team structure is critical for efficient planning and integration. Developers, project managers, operational heads, and investors will come together to determine the project scope and launch strategy.
Due to DevOps culture workflow design, however, one team may write code that can easily integrate with code written by other groups. Developers of mobile applications must ensure all development assets--text files, scripts, document configuration, and code--can be quickly found at any time.
Ensure that project milestones are being fulfilled consistently on schedule to monitor project development and determine when to launch it. Or hire an app development consulting service for assistance with planning.
Track Mobile App Testing to Evaluate the Performance of the App
Continuous testing is one of the main determinants of mobile app success; for accurate evaluation purposes, quality analyst teams must run tests across various mobile devices concurrently to assess app performance.
The team needs to consider:
- Device resolution. Resolution.
- Screen size for mobile devices varies significantly.
- Characteristics and capabilities.
- Features of the Application (or Features of an Application)
As such, it becomes essential that teams conduct tests both within their natural environment and on simulators/emulators to test mobile applications properly. Live environments may cause mobile apps to malfunction for several reasons, including memory, power, or network-related problems. Therefore, developers must install third-party SDKs into their apps and conduct continuous testing as this information will assist in pinpointing its primary cause and aid developers with a diagnosis of failures in real time.
As your automated testing process develops, you can better manage frequent builds, identify bugs quickly, and address challenging issues more effectively. Please visit our post on mobile app testing checklists for complete instructions.
Quality Control + Delivery and Deployment
From the start to delivery of an app's development process, operations and development teams must assess every line of code written and modifications made during its different phases of creation. Once delivery has taken place, continuous deployment takes effect - any modifications that pass continual testing are automatically deployed to live environments.
As the owner of an app, it's also essential to frequently monitor ratings and reviews in app stores for your app to better recognize any challenges involved with developing mobile applications as well as understand any difficulties users are encountering - this allows for improvements and modifications for future releases of the application.
Conclusion
DevOps is changing mobile app development by helping businesses meet user requirements while producing quality, secure apps. Through automation, cross-platform development cooperation, and security integration, mobile app developers are overcoming any potential hurdles to their work. They can produce and publish profitable apps that adapt to ever-changing market requirements. If you want to explore DevOps further, please reach out; they offer many solutions.
