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The future is mobile. Everyone globally either has or will have a mobile phone available in the near future. Some projections indicate that there will be 7.49 B smartphone users by 2025, and global spending on app and app-related purchases and subscriptions will reach $233B by 2026 - a 77% increase over five years. Companies, especially those in B2C industries, need a mobile strategy to remain accessible in the future.
Today the two main platforms are iOS and Android. Each platform has its own unique features, processes, opportunities, and challenges. Both platforms are rapidly evolving, which means that development teams must keep up with the rapid pace of innovation, and they expect their partners to do the same. In the 2023 Magic Quadrant, Gartner included Mobile App Delivery as one of the six evaluation criteria. Specifically, the ability to “build/test/deliver native mobile and mobile web applications”
GitLab's vision for Mobile DevOps is to provide high-value, best-in-class capabilities for enterprise flagship apps.
The vision for GitLab Mobile DevOps is to give mobile developers the ability to build, test, sign, release, and secure their applications using the GitLab tools they’re already familiar with. We do this by creating automation and tooling to enable developers to create a CI/CD pipeline with only a few clicks. They can then expand those capabilities by adding additional integrations and security tools.
We will approach this using a single-engineer group to enable us to explore this area rapidly. This also means we will focus on smaller iterations and use cases in areas in which we can quickly make progress.
Fastlane is the most popular open-source tool for mobile application development and release automation. We will utilize Fastlane in our automations and tools and contribute to the open-source project whenever possible. Please see our recent contributions for more details.
| Feature | Status | MoM Usage Change (November 2023) |
|---|---|---|
| macOS Build Environments | Public Beta | +5.8% (internal) |
| Project-level Secure Files | GA | +13.9% (internal) |
| Apple App Store Integration | GA | +11.1% (internal) |
| Google Play Integration | GA | +17.5% (internal) |
The future roadmap for Mobile DevOps will look to mature the build, sign, and release capabilities that exist today while introducing new features to support the test and secure stages of the process. Below are the items we look to address in coming releases.
There are several competitors in this space providing visual pipeline builders on top of their own CI/CD systems (Bitrise, Appcircle, and Codemagic) and the more prominent players, including Visual Studio App Center, Firebase, and AWS Mobile Services.
Feedback is essential to this project, so we encourage you to:
Please feel free to create issues or participate in discussions in our issue board.
We can also be found in Slack at #mobile-devops (internal)
Last Reviewed: 2023-11-03
Last Updated: 2023-11-03
