Book Image

Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

By : Doron Katz
Book Image

Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

By: Doron Katz

Overview of this book

Competitive mobile apps depend strongly on the development team’s ability to deliver successful releases, consistently and often. Although continuous integration took a more mainstream priority among the development industry, companies are starting to realize the importance of continuity beyond integration and testing. This book starts off with a brief introduction to fastlane—a robust command-line tool that enables iOS and Android developers to automate their releasing workflow. The book then explores and guides you through all of its features and utilities; it provides the reader a comprehensive understanding of the tool and how to implement them. Themes include setting up and managing your certificates and provisioning and push notification profiles; automating the creation of apps and managing the app metadata on iTunes Connect and the Apple Developer Portal; and building, distributing and publishing your apps to the App Store. You will also learn how to automate the generation of localized screenshots and mesh your continuous delivery workflow into a continuous integration workflow for a more robust setup. By the end of the book, you will gain substantial knowledge on delivering bug free, developer-independent, and stable application release cycle.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
www.PacktPub.com
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Beta testing tools


The two prominent tools for beta testing on iOS are TestFlight (https://developer.apple.com/testflight/) and Crashlytics (https://try.crashlytics.com/). There are other testing distribution tools, such as HockeyApp (https://www.hockeyapp.net/), worth mentioning (and, in fact, also compatible with fastlane), but for the purposes of this chapter, we are going to concentrate on the first two, starting with TestFlight.

Overview of TestFlight

TestFlight was one of the first over-the-air distribution services for testing mobile applications, starting out cross-platform back in 2010, supporting both Android and iOS. TestFlight was purchased by Apple back in 2014 and integrated as part of its development platform a few months later, with Apple removing support for Android.

TestFlight has always been a favorite amongst mobile developers. TestFlight is triggered by uploading a beta of your app to iTunes Connect and using the same portal for managing the testers of your app. Take a...