Starling Bank releases Android apps faster with Genymotion from AWS Marketplace

In this post, I will show how Starling Bank scaled its DevOps pipeline using Genymotion from AWS Marketplace. Starling Bank is a mobile-only bank based in the UK. With no branches or ATMs, its mobile app is the center of the company’s business. Starling Bank regularly maintains and improves its app, with a long history of daily releases. It uses continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) methodologies.

As the app became more complex, the traditional way of testing—with phones plugged into a computer—simply couldn’t scale to meet the company’s need for speed.

Starling Bank decided to test its Android app on virtual devices rather than physical devices. It chose Genymobile and its Genymotion solution, which runs virtual Android devices on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. “The bank runs in AWS, so getting Genymotion from AWS Marketplace was the shortest path to achieving our goals,” says Steven Newson, director of technology at Starling Bank.

Once Starling Bank integrated Genymotion into its CI/CD pipeline, it quickly got results. Automated alerts built into the code pipeline informed the DevOps team if a piece of code broke or test coverage dropped. By removing the need to manage infrastructure, Genymotion helps Starling Bank focus on building better features.

The cloud-based approach means Starling can scale its fleet of virtual devices in seconds to test multiple features in parallel. “We’ve kept our speed as we’ve scaled up,” says Newson. “We have always had a weekly release cadence, but automated testing ensures we can maintain it as our application becomes more capable and feature-rich.”

Ready to accelerate testing of your Android apps? Check out Genymobile in AWS Marketplace.

Want to read more about Starling Bank’s success with Genymobile? Read the full case study.