Mobile Release Engineering at Scale with Shipit Mobile

Summary

Shopify built Shipit Mobile to replace error-prone, manual mobile app releases with a shared platform for creating, viewing, and managing releases. The process creates a release branch from master, builds a candidate for each commit, increments build numbers, and starts separate CI pipelines for testing and release builds. Shipit Mobile uploads the same binary and metadata to distribution channels including Google Play, the App Store, and internal support access, using store APIs and Fastlane, while Slack notifications make release status visible beyond the release captain. Developers can bypass CI when necessary for emergencies, and configuration favors convention over configuration for project metadata. After more than six months in production, the platform reduced release complexity, shortened the release cadence from three weeks to one week, and helped more people become release captains.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Each commit on a release branch creates a candidate with an incremented build number and triggers separate test and release-build CI pipelines.

2. 2

   The same release binary can be distributed through multiple channels, including Google Play, the App Store, and internal access for Shopify’s support team.

3. 3

   After more than six months in production, Shipit Mobile helped reduce the release cadence from three weeks to one week and made the Release Captain role easier to transfer.