Bitrise on AWS: macOS bare metal CI builder

My main use case for Bitrise is for releases, deployment, and distribution for testers.

I have set up multiple workflows for Bitrise so we could be built depending on their repos, on their secrets, and on their specific environments. So we can build a dev environment, build UAT environment, or even production environment builds of our apps, and then it's distributed through Firebase App Tester to our testers.

Bitrise offers quite a lot of valuable features. One of the good features is the ability to choose the machines on which it will run. It also gives you workflow recipes to ease the setup of your CI/CD flow.

Choosing the machines and using workflow recipes in Bitrise just speeds up and frees developers' time, so even managers or testers themselves can choose the flavors and create builds for specific apps. They can do testing without interrupting developers. As for workflow recipes, they're helping to set up it and do some specific hookups to, if you write a message, 'smoke,' or something like that, it will hook up that it's a smoke build and will post in our Slack channel so everyone can see that a new build was created and similar things. Also, recently we have added functionality to post the release notes with the build, so it takes a specific amount of recent commits, and then QAs can see which task is in this build and should we be able to test those tasks with a specific build or we need to create a new one.

It helps us save some action minutes from GitHub Actions and we can use free time from the developer side to build new features or do technical debt and similar things. It just improves the whole workflow for everyone.

I think it could probably be higher, but we probably are not using all the features and functionalities of Bitrise ourselves, so it's hard to give a higher number because I think more features could be done with it, but we are just not using it.

I have been using Bitrise for four and a half years, close to five years.

Read documentation and try talking with Bitrise chatbot if you are stuck on some things. They usually are quite good at providing reasonable answers which will lead you on a proper way to solve your issues.

I would say on average, Bitrise saves probably about 15 minutes a day.

The review process was quite simple, easy to understand, and not too long, so it's not boring. I would rate this review an 8 out of 10.

Deploying iOS and Android apps to the Play Store and App Store is the main use case for me with Bitrise.

I use Bitrise for deploying my React Native app, and for the iOS version, I have the setup for the yarn build and all my codebase script setup. I set that and all the configuration setup, including sign in with the App Store and all the configuration files, including a provision profile. I can get everything I need and start building. I also attach the pipeline with my GitHub, so whenever I push, the pipeline runs and uploads the new build with the increment version of the iOS build. For Android, I currently run differently because I need to run a different type of script for that.

Bitrise offers excellent pipeline-wise setup and all the setup scripts that are easy to use. The YML editor and all the tools are very useful, and that is the main purpose of Bitrise as a great tool to have.

The YML editor specifically helps me in my daily workflow by being a one-time setup with no hassle every time I need to check. It is a smooth process. The first time takes time to set up all the build-related pipeline setup, but as I use it further, it becomes quite smooth and easy to use. I can manage everything in one place, and I do not worry about any build errors. That is the main thing I can say.

Bitrise has positively impacted my organization because earlier we manually deployed, checked, and tested everything, which took much time to create a build along with machine-specific setups. After using Bitrise, it became very easy and hassle-free. It just becomes a matter of time to push the code, and everything runs smoothly. Deployment does not take much time. Bitrise is a very useful and time-saving tool, and it is very effective because we save our time and money in the organization.

Time-wise, before Bitrise, building an iOS build and an Android build differently while uploading took around four to five hours for me. Now with Bitrise, I do not need to worry about the build. I just push my code, and in the background, the Bitrise pipeline runs and uploads in less than thirty minutes. It is a very specific time-saving experience, and I also do not worry about creating a build, so I save considerable time regarding that.

Bitrise is quite usable, and the UI is good. There is no area for improvement I would suggest; it is perfect for me. Price-wise, I can tell that Bitrise could offer discounts.

Bitrise can be improved by adding some pre-setup builds already for iOS and Android setup with tutorials that are helpful to any new users. New users could see that they already have the pipeline created for platforms such as React Native, iOS, and Android without needing to create step-by-step setup. That is one improvement I can suggest.

I have been using Bitrise for the last two years. It is a very useful CI/CD tool for me, and I have been glad to work with Bitrise.

Bitrise is quite stable in my experience, with no issues, and it has been quite stable for me.

I do not need any customer support for my use case, and I have never used it because there is no need. Currently, there is no chance to have an error that needs customer support, so I have never experienced that.

Previously, we did not use any other tool before Bitrise. We heard about Bitrise and researched it, and planned to use it since it is a good tool that reduces hassle for build creation and helps us create our CI/CD setup.

Pricing-wise, Bitrise is at the higher end. We need some discounts if we are using it for more than a year or two years, and the overall pricing is also good. The setup cost and licensing are very good.

Before choosing Bitrise, we checked Fastlane and other tools, and we found Bitrise to be a financially appealing and easy-to-use tool, so we picked Bitrise for our accelerated development.

Bitrise is a very great tool.

For those looking into Bitrise for mobile-related development, if you are planning to create and upload a build for the Play Store, this is the tool I can recommend. I already shared Bitrise with some of my friends and others, saying it is very useful to reduce time and money. I rate this product a 3 out of 5 based on my overall experience.

My main use case for Bitrise is mainly for iPhone builds, mobile development, and mobile builds. It really helps.

I am mainly using Bitrise for iPhone workflows where it handles the certificates, signs the application, tests the build, and finally publishes it to the App Store. This is the whole workflow I am using.

In my opinion, the best features Bitrise offers are that it is easy to create workflows, support always helps us, and it can be used with a lot of different things.

When I say easy to create workflows, it is easy to build workflows because you can select a lot of built-in steps, so they can help you to come up with workflows easier.

Bitrise has positively impacted my organization because we can build the applications easier.

Bitrise has made building applications easier because it has improved the time we are spending on them. It is saving a lot of time. It is really easy for developers to build the applications because they can just invoke those workflows. This makes it easier to find the errors, improve the time, and improve the collaboration.

I think Bitrise can be improved because it is kind of pricey at the moment.

Regarding Bitrise's AI capabilities, I think its accuracy and reliability of output need improvement because from time to time the accuracy is low, but it is good overall.

I have been using Bitrise for four years.

Regarding Bitrise's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are pretty good.

I would advise others looking into using Bitrise to just use them. My rating for this review is 9.

My main use case for Bitrise is that we use it as a CI/CD platform to build our Cordova applications and further distribute them to Apple and Google stores.

Regarding my main use case with Bitrise, the cases that we need to cover work great for us. We have an option to store distribution certificates and any other certificates that are required for the build to work, and the configuration is very straightforward.

The best features Bitrise offers include the option to cache builds, although we decided to stop using it because the builds don't take a lot of time. I think it's the simplicity of configuring the workflows and the simplicity of configuring parallel workflows. In general, there's an option to build native applications.

The simplicity of Bitrise impacts my day-to-day work and my team's workflow because we have a single YAML file stored as part of the repository that has been set in stone for quite some time. Whenever we need to introduce a new workflow that would be similar to an existing one but for a different customer, it's just copy and paste. We can also use the UI at the Bitrise website directly to select all of the steps and provide the values for the input fields. It's straightforward and there are not many steps needed to configure it and have it up and running.

Bitrise has positively impacted my organization since we need a way to build native apps for Android and iOS that is efficient and fast, so the delivery to Play Store and App Stores does not take hours. We are rather talking about minutes here, which means that we can react to any customer requests and deliver when there is a new feature or bug fix. We can quickly spin up the build and then have it available for external testers on Play Console or in App Store Connect.

What kept it from being a ten is because I don't give tens. It's a great tool and I think eight is a great number. There's always room for improvement and it's not the perfect tool.

Regarding Bitrise's AI capabilities, I think the accuracy and reliability of output are pretty accurate and reliable nowadays.

I have been using Bitrise for the past seven and a half years.

Bitrise is stable.

Scalability of Bitrise is great.

Customer support of Bitrise is great.

Before Bitrise, we use Bitrise and GitHub Actions in parallel. Bitrise is needed for our native builds to work.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Bitrise is that I cannot really say because I don't manage these things. I think it would be around 1,000 euros per month for around 18,000 credits or 12,000 credits, but I don't remember from the top of my head. The setup is easy and I think the price, considering what we need to use it for, is justified.

My main use case for Bitrise is for automating CI/CD in the projects where I work. I use Bitrise to automate processes for pushing releases, building versions, and building PRs. When we open a PR, we automate the whole process, so Bitrise is responsible for running the project build, the unit tests that we have, and also checking that nothing is breaking in SwiftLint. These are the use cases that we have today in the company that uses Bitrise.

The best features that Bitrise offers are the automation and also the speed that we get. It makes easier some processes that we have internally here in the projects, adding speed, agility, and ease of maintenance of the project, and maintaining the quality of the code that we have in the project for the final delivery.

Bitrise helps speed up the development process in my team because we stop doing the whole process of pushing versions and build checks all manually. Bitrise does this in an automated way. We configure the tool and then it already does all this automatically and with agility in the process. It facilitates deployment processes for us here, reducing development time, configuration time, among other things.

A positive impact that Bitrise has had on my organization is that it kept the version releases consistent and we were able to catch PR problems, build and test problems, and SwiftLint issues during code review time. We were able to catch these points in an automated way through Bitrise. This had a very positive impact in terms of release deployment time and quality. Bitrise has helped us a lot in these processes. This has been a very positive impact for us here, especially because we work with several teams, and we don't have that much manual control over this. Bitrise manages to take care of this automatically and maintain the quality of the whole release process.

Today I don't see any improvement points for Bitrise. It serves us very well, and the project is going very well with Bitrise. At certain times we have failures within the tool itself where we need to debug, look at logs, and understand these points. Because of that, it wouldn't be a 10.

I have been using Bitrise for five years.

Bitrise has not had any stability issues for now.

I would rate Bitrise's scalability as great.

I consider Bitrise's customer support very good.

I have used Fastlane, but in some aspects the tool was not meeting our needs. So we migrated everything to Bitrise.

The interview was great and very intuitive. I was able to understand everything and the questions were very objective.

Bitrise was evaluated between Fastlane and Bitrise for continued use.

I would advise them to implement Bitrise as soon as possible in the project to make it easier to automate delivery and version release processes, including on the mobile side, which is my main area. I would give some suggestions for additional configurations. Bitrise with well-defined and well-configured processes is Bitrise that will work very well in an application. I would also advise them to understand which processes they need and what would be necessary within their project so that they don't make mistakes, so they can do an optimal configuration and have a great experience with the tool. I would rate this product a 9 overall.

My main use case for Bitrise is as a build and deployment mechanism. I use Bitrise at the end of the day to generate a nightly build and also for all our release processes to the App Store and Play Store. It helped us with our main use case by solving issues around parallelization in the generation of the builds and also how to generate a build per pull request and share the artifact with the developers without giving them access to Bitrise itself.

Bitrise positively impacted my organization because the company used to do a release monthly or every two months, but with Bitrise system, we were able to optimize the process and now we do bi-weekly releases.

In achieving bi-weekly releases with Bitrise, we noticed improvements in time saved. Our release and build process went really fast, taking 20 minutes to generate a build for developers to test and for QA, and that is all thanks to Bitrise for always bringing the latest machines, having their system updated, and maintaining it well.

I believe the best features Bitrise offers include their support team, which is the best feature they actually offer. They are really helpful and always jump in to help and are genuinely interested in your process and how to optimize your internal deployments and building system. Recently, they gave a new scaffolding to make the boilerplate easier and to structure your Bitrise files, so that would be the best feature they have right now.

Bitrise gives you full control on the virtual machine and the processes, which has helped me specifically. They encourage you to do things right but don't force you to go through a template or a specific recipe that they have, so you can actually write your own scripts. Recently, for the EPO launch, we were coordinating the integration with Warsquare, a third-party company, and Bitrise actually helped us to do the connection between the virtual machine and their services, even though they are not required to do that. Whenever we spot any bug around our building process, they always jump in to help with a custom script, feedback, or insights from other clients that they have, and they also investigate for themselves what the problem was.

Bitrise's support team always receives feedback, so if you have any blocking point or improvement area, you can share it and they actually do it, which is something that surprised me. What they can improve right now is around the charts and metrics they provide. Right now, it is pretty generic about the performance of your machine and how much time each process takes, but they could evolve those charts to be more mobile DevOps metrics specific.

I have been using Bitrise for the last five years.

Bitrise is stable, pretty much.

On a factor of a Bitrise client, I think its scalability is great. They allow you to launch as many machines as you can.

Bitrise's customer support is really good. They are quite supportive and always answer. The only thing that might be an impact if you are an American company is that most of their team is based in Europe, so for critical feedback or bug resolution that requires an architect from their side, you might need to wait until the next day or use European hours, but they always have someone on call.

I did not previously use a different solution before Bitrise at Hinge Health, but I was using TestFairy and App Center before. I switched to Bitrise because it is more stable and it gives you full control of the virtual machines and is easier to implement.

Around time saved, I think is where we got the best return on investment with Bitrise because our build process went from taking hours to 20 minutes or even faster. Regarding other money saved or employees needed, I do not have any specifics around that.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing with Bitrise was positive. They have a credit system and then evolved to a build number system. They also give you a buffer. For example, if you are reaching your limit, they notify you, and you also have a buffer. They guarantee you that you never run out of processes, ensuring that you will always be able to generate your build, no matter if you expand or pass that limit, and then coordinate in your next schedule an expansion of the number of builds or credits that you can use.

Before choosing Bitrise, I evaluated other options including TestFairy and Runway, but at the end of the day, we stuck with Bitrise because it was what was already implemented at Hinge Health.

I advise others looking into using Bitrise to make sure that you have a good understanding of user roles and to whom you provide access to the tool, and to have a clear understanding of mobile operations. Whenever you use Bitrise, feel free to reach out to customer support for integration and help, because they can schedule one-on-ones with their experts and provide you with a full onboarding on how to use Bitrise and do things properly. I would rate this experience a 10 out of 10.

Currently, we are building and deploying iOS and Android applications through Bitrise. We have a web maker tool through which we build the iOS IPA and Android APK packets. We have multiple pipelines over Bitrise, and in a single project, I have multiple workflows in which one workflow deploys the application over bitrise.io and one pipeline I use to deploy over the Play Store and App Store. The main use case is building the Android packets and iOS packets and deploying them over the Play Store and App Stores.

The best features I would say are that if we want to build an application for iOS, we would normally need a Mac, but with Bitrise, we do not need any Mac as Bitrise already provides virtual machines based on my requirements like which Xcode version I have to use, what Android SDK versions I need, and what Java version I need. Everything Bitrise gives me on its VM machine.

The way Bitrise provides the connectors is a good thing. The main thing which I love about it is that you do not have to write a full script and coding. It is not required in Bitrise as it gives a lot of plugins and we use fastlane, so Bitrise also gives us the flexibility to use fastlane to write the automations. That is also a good thing.

Previously, we used to have multiple MacBooks through which we manually requested a person to deploy the build the application and share the IPA link and APK link with us. But now we have automated everything through Bitrise as it gives on-demand virtual machines and Macs. This is a big benefit, and we have reduced the DevOps engineer count from five to three to manage the mobile applications.

The biggest improvement I would say is that in the workflow, we have a plugin script, and that script window is dynamic. If we are writing something, it automatically gets shrunk. This is the biggest flaw which I have seen in Bitrise. If I am writing any script, it gets shrunk dynamically, and that should be removed or we should be given an option to disable it.

The second thing is that currently we are using Harness to deploy our applications. Other platforms like Jenkins have set up webhooks through which we do not have to manually deploy any application and trigger the jobs into Harness. I want the same thing with Bitrise; we should get a Harness connector over Bitrise so that through Harness, we can trigger Bitrise workflows, and we should not give access to all the dev and QA for triggering the workflows. I would suggest that if we can have one Harness connector through which developers just trigger the build and automatically a job gets triggered to Bitrise.

I have been using Bitrise for three years.

Bitrise is stable.

As our code size is increasing, I have never faced challenges scaling my builds as Bitrise gives us the flexibility to increase the virtual machines. Bitrise's scalability is also good.

I have communicated multiple times with Bitrise support regarding my builds and in case we want any older machines. The customer experience I have had is very good. They are very responsive.

Previously in my old setup, we had fastlane through which we used to manually deploy the applications over the TestFlights and Android beta releases. That was everything manual, and here we save a lot of time because I have set up the job triggers through which if anyone is committing to the branch, automatically Bitrise starts building the app, and if it is a development environment, it uploads to bitrise.io. I have also integrated the Microsoft plugins through which automatically developers and QA get notified, and they can download the applications from bitrise.io. Once the testing is done, we manually trigger the job workflow over Bitrise, and it deploys the applications over the TestFlights and beta releases.

The first time I have used Bitrise.

Previously, we used to take one day to deploy the application, but now in thirteen to twenty minutes through our automation and with the help of Bitrise's flexibilities, we deploy the application. That is where we save a big amount of time.

Bitrise supports RBAC, which is the main point where we can isolate our projects based on the developers, QA, and all. We can isolate the accesses and authorization. That is a big point.

I cannot comment much on the governance side because we have never faced any security issues whenever we had an audit. It also provides us the feature of secrets where we can encrypt the secrets, and I think from the perspective of governance and security, it is a good one.

Previously, we had five DevOps engineers, and now we need three DevOps engineers to manage Bitrise. Previously, we had to be dependent on MacBooks, but here we are not dependent on MacBooks as on demand we get the virtual machines and we perform our tasks. I think we have saved a lot of cost.

On the licensing side, we do not manage that, as we have a different team that manages that. The costing is much less if we compare it to acquiring different MacBooks and building the applications. It is cheaper for us.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Bitrise.

If any organization is having a mobile application, I would recommend them to use Bitrise because of its flexibility, scalability, and cheap and on-demand prices. I have rated this review nine out of ten.