Continuous delivery for mobile devices

Since the last radar a few advances have made continuous delivery for native apps on mobile devices less painful. Xctool, the recently open-sourced 'better xcodebuild' improves iOS build automation and unit testing. The arrival of automatic updates in iOS7 reduces the friction of regular releases. Travis-CI now supports OS X agents, removing another hurdle in seamless CD pipelines for mobile platforms. Our advice from the last radar on the value of hybrid approaches and the importance of test automation for mobile still applies.

With HTML5 blurring the line between traditional native apps and web apps, we are beginning to experiment with continuous delivery for mobile devices. Services such as TestFlight allow you to deploy native apps to real devices multiple times per day. With a wholly or partially HTML5-based application changes can be deployed without submitting a new app to an app store. If your organization has an enterprise app store, you may be able to easily push builds to it. While the techniques for implementing CD to mobile devices are improving, we note that testing practices are lagging behind. To be successful you will need to increase your focus on automated testing to ensure that everything actually works once it gets to the device.