Buddybuild: Build, deploy and gather feedback for iOS and Android apps | Hacker News Reader

Buddybuild: Build, deploy and gather feedback for iOS and Android apps

buddybuild.com

72 pointsbenhoyt21 comments

Thanks for posting buddybuild Ben!

At a high level, Buddybuild is a mobile focused continuous integration, continuous deployment and user feedback solution that takes minutes to setup.

We want to help mobile developers build better apps, faster. To do so, we've built an end-to-end system that unlocks a simple workflow: a simple 'git push' to build, deploy, gather feedback and iterate.

As we tried using existing solutions, we felt that there was an unnecessary amount of complexity involved in creating builds, getting those builds to users and then getting meaningful and actionable feedback from those users.

If you're an iOS developer, you'll never have to manage new devices, UDIDs, provisioning profiles or signing identities again. New testers and their devices are automatically provisioned on your behalf through buddybuild.

Further, buddybuild’s deployment service can deploy instantly on every build, every night, or at the push of a button.

By simply taking a screenshot, testers can send graphically annotated screenshots and feedback notes. If your app crashes, buddybuild will trace back and highlight the exact line of source code that caused the crash, tell you which users were affected, and how many times the crash has occurred.

Finally, get a heads up on any potential breaking changes in Xcode. Within 48 hours of the release, buddybuild automatically takes your most recent successful build, builds and runs tests against the latest version of Xcode (including betas!) and emails you the results.

Of course, built in integrations with your favorite services - GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, Slack, JIRA Pivotal Tracker, Slack, and HipChat.

With buddybuild, you no longer need to cobble together disparate systems to be able to iterate quickly on mobile.

If you want to get a sense for the experience, you checkout http://www.buddybuild.com/demo

Happy to answer any questions people might have!

Haven't used it myself but talked to a couple people who were startled by how easy it was to set up and get running.

Obviously the value prop is amazing- so if it is that easy to integrate this is crazy.

We use buddy build pretty actively. It's a Game Changer! It took about 2 minutes to get up and running and we have a free CI process for all our builds. I particularly love the automatic upload of symbol files for error tracking. BB is a big win in my book!

Nice to see BB here! We used BB to build our iOS app; over 3 months, it made the process of iterating, deploying and collecting feedback on our prototypes incredibly easy. Great product and a very proactive team. One feature that BB has that is particularly useful is the ability to deploy test builds to various groups. We deploy a build internally to our team group at least once daily, and then another more polished version to our most avid beta-testers at least once a week.

What does BB offer that TestFlight doesn't? I currently use TestFlight and the external testing, although requiring beta app review is pretty simple.

We don't think of it as an either/or (In fact, buddybuild supports deploying directly to Testflight as well).

Buddybuild's deployment really comes into its own earlier in the dev cycle - when you want to deploy to your internal team (who might want to jump to old builds or different branches) - when you want to schedule deployments (every evening for example) - or when you want to send a build very quickly to someone.

We've made the onboarding experience for new testers very simple - automatically handling adding UDIDs to provisioning profile. Also, not having to install a separate app is very appealing to some people.

We show off that part in our demo : http://www.buddybuild.com/demo

Testflight works really well for very large external test groups.

Does the iOS component use fastlane tools?

We use the spaceship gem, but none of the fastlane cli tools.

One of the things we really wanted to enable was an incredibly simple set up process, but while balancing that with giving a developer the ability to work in the way they want to work.

So while we automatically handle most of the common situations, there's always the ability to run custom scripts and do whatever you want to do. Many teams are doing interesting things like this.

is there pricing information available?

The service is currently free!

Further, we plan to always have a free tier (for Open Source projects, and for hobby / indie developers).

That said, we'll have a multi-tier pricing offering and plan to announce those specific in the next few months!

Do you have/plan integration with Unity3d platform?

My app has client and server, and often, both has to be released simultaneously. Server has dev/test/beta/production deploys w/ different databases, correlated to dev/alpha/beta/store in Google Play and dev/internal/external/store in iTunes connect. Server URL for each stage/build is embedded in the binary. Can your platform handle deploying not only client, but server as well?

I think Unity is something we'd love to support in the long term. I don't know what the timeline on the would be though.

We already have people who are using buddybuild to co-ordinate deploying mobile and server apps (either a full environment or something like Parse's Cloud Code). I've also seen people spin up a local server environment for running iOS Simulator tests against, so their entire stack can be tested.

I started using them for my apps not too long ago. I sent them some feedback and they are sending me a Starbucks gift card. Pretty good for a free service. https://twitter.com/andytriboletti/status/690604902314315776

Well, we care deeply about customer experience.. and we're happy to buy our users coffee when they take the time to send us feedback!

Awh man is this cool!

I had a similar idea kicking around for a while (for a different market) because you end up managing disparate targets (including multiple digital distributors for one platform) each with their own slightly broken of doing things. It. Sucks. Hard.

Now that I'm only tangentially involved with the market my previous experience (of intense pain) is reduced, but has been replaced with iOS and Android.

I'm looking forward to using BuddyBuild for the next app I work on.

How are you handling the Apple side of things? Last I checked, you had to store full credentials to someone's Apple ID. Looks like you are doing exactly that.

My big concern is that you're siloing my credentials so they won't get leaked. How are you doing that?

We take this very seriously.

At a high level, our front end servers can write credentials, but never read them.

Only the build machines (which are isolated from the public internet) can decrypt and use them... and only for a short duration during a build.

A good portion of our infrastructure is built on AWS - where a majority of our team had worked to build services with similar secure environments.

I just tried this out for my first iOS app. Very cool stuff. Your demo and on-boarding process is very smooth.

Just a little feedback - I was hesitant to sign up because I didn't want to love it and find out it is out of my range price-wise. When I saw your comment about it being free for indie developers, hobbyists, and open source, that's when I decided to sign up. My general impression with SaaS has often been that "No price listed" means "This is for enterprise, and you can't afford it." So you may want to consider saying something about your future pricing plans/tiers, even if you can't really nail it down right now.

This is really helpful feedback - thanks for taking the time to write it up! We'll put together a placeholder to help address pricing concerns.

Also, I'm glad to hear that your on-boarding was smooth!

Buddybuild is awesome. We've been using it for a couple of months now. It has so many great, easy to use features, that are all built in for you, so you don't get bogged down with tool overload. If anyone's interested, I can go into more detail about how we use bb.

I would be very interested, thanks! We're just looking at buddybuild as a possibility for our new Oyster.com app, and I'm impressed so far.

Wish this was around last year when we launched our app - removing the tedium of build/deploy/versioning to diff groups. Think I'm more excited about containing the feedback into the workflow. Emails, screenshots and overlays worked but felt clunky. Bundling all of this together makes sense. Will give it a try with our next app (note: appreciate the pricing love for indie developers)

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