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Comment by 6figurelenins | Hacker News Reader

> mobile app developers are stuck with pushing builds every night and waiting a day for the team to see the new code

That doesn't ring true. TestFlight / Play Store uploads are typically available within 15 minutes.

Still, it's nice you're solving deployment overhead. In particular, my team needs side-by-side installs of the live/prod build and dev/staging build.

It's double the headache to stand up a store listing and comply with policy changes, just for an internal distribution channel. Save me.

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Totally true that TestFlight / Play Store uploads are available within 15 min, but in our experience, nobody wants to push to those platform that frequently, and force many upgrades of the app every day, so instead they do nightly builds at best. More importantly, it doesn't help if people don't have the right phone. We would love to help you with this use case, does an emulator in the browser works for you or do you need to install to phones?

For me, an emulator solves the 80% case: I'm soliciting quick feedback on specific changes. I'd happily use one as TestFlight for dev builds. I'm optimistic my users (my team) would find it more convenient, less interruptive. I'll ask them.

The other 20% is stuff that doesn't work in an emulator. Usually Apple, certificates.

It's enough of a minefield that QA means real devices, unfortunately. Used phones are vastly cheaper than "false alarm" bug reports.

> in our experience, nobody wants to push to those platform that frequently, and force many upgrades of the app every day, so instead they do nightly builds at best

If my team's big enough for daily builds, we have continuous deployment (Fastlane or similar). Strictly speaking, the pain is the build step (slow; can be flaky), not pushing the artifact.

I hope this is helpful. Feel free to dig deeper, I'll keep an eye on this thread.

Thanks for the feedback, and let us know if your team is interested.

For the deployment, wolfia allows you to share builds before they are merged and solicit feedback from your team earlier. If you think about it, the feedback loop is much faster in practice than waiting for deployment and then getting the feedback. However, I do agree that the build step is a pain! Our vision is to bring the same experience web developers have to mobile essentially, so we'll take a stab at it in the future :)

I think many commenters here haven’t been a mobile engineer at a large company- most engineers don’t have creds to manage the app for the face of a +50B company.

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