Mobile Release Engineering at Scale: ShipIt Mobile
Article Summary
Alejandro Rodriguez Salamanca from Shopify reveals how manual mobile releases were killing their velocity. The solution? A platform that cut release cycles from 3 weeks to 1 week.
Shopify's mobile teams faced a messy reality: releasing apps meant manual steps, untested scripts, and release managers drowning in coordination tasks. Each team had their own process, making knowledge transfer nearly impossible. They built Shipit Mobile to bring web-style deployment convenience to mobile releases.
Key Takeaways
- Release cycle time dropped from 3 weeks to 1 week after implementation
- Trunk-based branching model prevents accidental code inclusion in releases
- Automated Slack notifications removed communication burden from release captains
- Emergency bypass allows releases without CI when infrastructure fails
- Convention over configuration approach simplifies onboarding new projects
Critical Insight
Shopify's Shipit Mobile platform automated mobile release engineering, cutting release cycles by 66% while making the release captain role transferable across teams.
