I write about digital transformation in the mobile space and am the CTO and cofounder of Mobile DevOps company Bitrise.
While there are established best practices and rules that software and web developers follow, mobile development is still in its infancy. Mobile teams are navigating a very nuanced set of challenges as they go. Chief among these challenges is the additional layers of complexity that the Google and Apple app stores create for mobile businesses.
App stores act as gatekeepers standing between businesses and their potential users. In their efforts to create standards and enforce quality, they’ve introduced a series of steps, processes, required updates and even technological specifications that uniquely affect the mobile app economy and the companies that operate in it.
Companies must play by app stores’ rules to increase their rankings, gain more visibility among consumers and, therefore, tip the scales in their favor among potential audiences. There are dozens of make-or-break metrics that influence these critical outcomes, from how frequently companies update their apps to how quickly they fix bugs when they emerge. However, there has not been a common industry standard that teams can look to in order to understand how they’re performing relative to others.
For traditional development teams, Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) offers insight into thousands of companies’ performance across standard practices that influence their success. Mobile teams can learn from these, but they fundamentally need their own benchmarks to understand how they stack up when it comes to mobile-specific practices.
In response to this need, we released the world’s first mobile DevOps benchmarks report. The Mobile DevOps Assessment (MODAS) gives a detailed snapshot of how more than 1,600 mobile teams are performing across the metrics that dictate their success in app stores so that companies can assess where they stand once and for all.
Companies need to release apps more frequently to increase visibility in app stores.
Releasing once a month is no longer enough to stand out from the abundance of apps in the market.
The companies with leading apps are pushing updates to the app store as often as once a week, but that only encompasses 11% of them. While a biweekly cadence is also enough to consistently put an app in front of consumers, only 21% of companies are releasing that frequently. The majority of companies (62%) admit to falling short of release cycle expectations.
The frequency at which companies release their apps to market can make or break their success, seeing as more releases and updates directly translate to higher app store rankings and, therefore, more visibility to potential users.
One reason many companies aren’t releasing as frequently as they’d like to—or should be—is that instead of automating their processes, they’re still taking a manual approach to time-consuming aspects of the app development life cycle such as creating builds, running tests and troubleshooting. We found that 9% of companies have their mobile testing fully automated, while 44% of companies’ processes are almost entirely manual. Some companies are even still manually babysitting physical hardware instead of using the cloud-based software they need in order to automate.
Before moving to automate, introduce mobile-first teams and operations.
If something is not directly related to creative innovation and UX, organizations should look to automate it—at least partially. They should also consider introducing a dedicated mobile DevOps function internally.
Before making any sudden moves, however, companies should first introduce dedicated mobile DevOps teams to take them into the next phase of their evolution. While many companies already have traditional DevOps teams, mobile apps come packed with nuanced challenges and needs that traditional web and software teams aren’t innately equipped to address.
A mobile-first team, on the other hand, can understand how to structure internal teams, choreograph operations and introduce technology that optimizes mobile workflows, builds processes and releases frequencies—all with their apps’ and business performance in mind.
For instance, one approach that savvy, mobile-first teams deploy to keep mobile projects streamlined is called “shifting left.” It’s the act of beginning software testing as early as possible in the development process—or toward the “left” of the pipeline—rather than waiting until the middle or end where any issues they identify will be more time-consuming and costly than those caught along the way.
Companies need to kill bugs immediately to prevent an infestation.
Imagine the pushback that would accompany a popular app like Instagram or LinkedIn crashing for over 24 hours.
While high performers usually have bugs fixed within a couple of hours, we found that it takes most companies a minimum of two days to sort out glitches. This is mainly due to a lack of app performance monitoring.
For organizations that aren’t getting bug fixes in quickly enough, there are two main things they should prioritize. First, they should automate their troubleshooting. Half of the battle when it comes to fixing bugs is first spotting their origin so they can be addressed. When handled manually, this can take several hours in and of itself.
The second thing organizations need to shift is their workflow prioritization. Instead of putting bug fixes at the back of the queue, bugs need to be elevated to mission-critical status ahead of day-to-day updates and maintenance.
There are software solutions to both of these needs. The ideal scenario is for companies to introduce software that manages all of their mobile DevOps workflows in one place. This way, bugs are both automatically spotted and then quickly prioritized, eliminating the need for any manual intervention leading up to addressing the bug itself.
This streamlined approach will enable mobile developers to push new, clean versions of their apps to the app store as quickly and as efficiently as possible—ideally before many users even notice.
The mobile industry is on a rapid growth path, posing multiple opportunities for mobile companies. As more competitors enter the space, the mobile organizations that succeed in increasing release frequency and efficiency will be the ones to stand out in the app store—and, therefore, to consumers.
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