Creating award-winning apps with Bitrise
Meet Atomic Robot
Atomic Robot is an award-winning app agency creating digital products that transform businesses and accelerate innovation. They specialize in building native iOS and Android apps, but also backend and web solutions that improve the lives of users on their favorite devices. Working in tight-knit, collaborative teams, they develop solutions with craft and quality.
Their team setup for each project is made up of a project manager, developers, designers, and an app architect. To deliver the best results, they make sure that they maintain close relationships with clients and have quick feedback cycles with tight dialogues.
One of their clients, VITAS Healthcare — the nation’s leading hospice care provider — wanted to create an app to aid healthcare professionals in determining hospice eligibility. They wanted something special, so the team decided on Flutter and created an app with built-in, personalized disease-specific guidelines and interactive calculators that became a huge success. The VITAS app ended up winning the Mobile UX award in the Health category and a Silver W3 Award in Health & Wellness.
Scaling comes with increased complexity
A couple of years ago they had a self-hosted TeamCity instance for their iOS and Android apps. This involved too much time so when the test devices were hitting the end of their lives, they started looking for a cloud provider specifically tailored for mobile. As the team was getting bigger and bigger, they needed a solution that would allow them to scale.
They experimented a bit with Codemagic and had used BuddyBuild for their iOS apps for a short time before it got acquired. When they first tried Bitrise, it ticked all the boxes: easy setup, latest XCode support within 24 hours, preloaded stacks — and they could even use it for their backend and docker images. On top of that, any time they had an issue, it was always quickly solved by Bitrise’s responsive support team.
A quick, easy-to-use tool that takes care of everything
The fact that they had previous experience with other CI tools was helpful, but the detailed DevCenter documentation made the migration even easier. The initial project setup was done in less than an hour thanks to the out-of-the-box Steps, and the easy-to-use, intuitive UI.
Being able to automate more and more parts of their app development cycle and to customize Workflows and triggers are making the team more efficient. Since Bitrise automatically recognizes projects, they can start things from scratch — its shareable Workflows make it easy for anyone to jump in and contribute.
“We love that Bitrise integrates with everything and doesn’t require third-party tools. It just works.”
The team loves the Script Step for when they need to write and run their own custom scripts. They also regularly use Bitrise’s Steps to deploy to TestFlight and the App Store, Google Play, as well as Firebase App Distribution. Thanks to the Certificate and profile installer Step, the previously dreaded iOS code signing processes have become painless.
There’s nothing more frustrating than getting an iOS build rejected by the App Store teams because a version or build number did not get updated. Bitrise solves this problem too — they are able to automatically update build numbers and version numbers as well. The Send a Slack message Step is also really useful for keeping everyone up-to-date about what’s going on at all times. No one has to put together an email to inform clients and other teams about the progress anymore. Additionally, all the Flutter Steps worked fantastically out of the box for their projects.
“Bitrise is the ultimate tool for all of our mobile needs, no matter which platform we use. We all understand it, it’s easy to set up and follow — we can all contribute, without having to worry about maintenance or breaks.”
Delivering high-quality solutions to clients
“Having one shared instance that takes care of everything is amazing.”
Before using Bitrise, a lot of things broke due to the complexity of running different apps. Since the switch, they have been able to isolate projects — waiting on builds and troubleshooting are a thing of the past. Not being distracted helps them focus more on cross-functional collaboration and build better apps.
Using the platform has not only helped the team focus on creating a higher quality product but also to maintain a quick and tight feedback loop with customers. They have internal builds several times a week, by which they can enable clients to provide incredibly rapid feedback on what’s being built:
“Whenever a client wants to check the app’s progress, they immediately see that we’re consistent and have our act together. Bitrise is the tool that enables us to always hit the needs of clients and maintain this level of professionalism.”