Launch HN: Bitrise (YC W17) – Continuous Integration and Delivery for Mobile Apps
Bitrise is a Continuous Integration and Delivery platform specifically for mobile apps. We started working on Bitrise when we were running our dev agency, building apps for clients. It was frustrating to go through all the manual tasks when somebody needed a fresh build, or when all the bugs piled up before releases. We wanted to automate all the manual aspects of app development so we could get back to coding, because that’s what we loved to do.
We’ve started with iOS CI/CD, because that seemed to be the hardest and that’s what we had the most experience in. For starters we had to build up a scalable Mac infrastructure, since iOS apps can only be compiled on a Mac machine. That was tough.
We also wanted to make setting up and maintaining CI way easier, without scripting, but having the same level of customizability. We’ve come up with an easy workflow and step system, where steps are ready-made and reusable building blocks responsible for one task, like git cloning, deploying to HockeyApp, etc, and workflows are a succession of these steps. All of these steps are open source, and since we started the library grew to more than 100 integrations, around 30 added by the community (https://www.bitrise.io/integrations).
Tens of thousands of apps are being built on Bitrise including Foursquare, InVision, Pagerduty, Grindr. We are attracting so many apps because we are the most open platform in this space. In addition to our step library, we’ve open sourced our CLI, our webhook service and all of our build images, and we’re growing together with our awesome community.
We raised $200k in 2015 and became profitable last year. We feel extremely grateful and lucky to have gotten here, being a 7-people dev shop in Europe. Now we’re joining YC and we have big plans to take Bitrise to the next level!
We’d love to hear your feedback and are happy to answer any of your questions. Thanks!