Unraveling Mobile CI/CD: Accelerating Development through Automation

3 min readNov 13, 2022

Hello everyone! In this article, we’ll explore CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) and its impact on mobile application development. Simply put, CI/CD automates the process of taking developed code from repositories, installing it in test environments, and distributing the final builds to relevant platforms.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Let’s first delve into Continuous Integration. The primary goal of CI is to regularly incorporate the code contributions from multiple developers into the main project. This ensures that all work packages are seamlessly integrated, facilitating a smooth development process.

Basic Pipeline and Flow

Retrieve code/packages from repositories.
Initiate the build process.
Ensure successful package builds.
Begin Unit Testing.
Confirm Unit Tests pass successfully.
Initiate Integration Tests.
Confirm Integration Tests pass successfully.

Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment (CD)

Upon successful completion of CI, the build moves to the next stages:

Continuous Delivery prepares the build for deployment, making it ready for further testing and quality assurance in production-like environments. Human approval is required for the final move to production.
Continuous Deployment automates the entire process. Once the code passes all tests, it is automatically deployed to production servers, requiring no human intervention.

CI/CD in the Mobile Sphere

Mobile development comes with unique challenges; the cost of bugs is considerably higher and deployment often involves app store approvals, consuming more time.

In continuous delivery, code automatically moves to production-like environments for further testing and quality assurance, and human intervention is required to move into production following successful tests.
In continuous deployment, automation goes further. Once the code passes testing, the deployment to production happens automatically — there is no human approval needed.

CI-CD on Mobile

In mobile development, the cost of bugs in production is higher than in other software development and is gated by app store approvals this is mean more time. We talk title by title for Mobile.

Quality Assurance: Integrate code review and unit testing into the CI process to ensure top-notch code quality.
Efficiency and Rollbacks: Utilizing CI/CD pipelines allows for quicker fixes, feature releases, and simple rollbacks in case of issues.
Real-time Feedback: Release updates more frequently to receive timely user feedback.
Targeted Testing: Automatically include Branch, Commit ID, and Commit Description in release notes for more focused testing.
Uniformity: Encourages the development team to use a common structure, reducing device-based or individual errors.
Enhanced Security: Minimizes risks associated with accessing production environments from office networks.
Cost-Effectiveness: Save up to 16% on AWS through autoscaling features.
Time-saving: Substantially cut down both build time and static analysis time, with savings of up to 77%.