Mobile Tophatting at Shopify
Article Summary
Pedro Piñera from Shopify reveals how they turned a 15-minute context switch into a single command. No QA team? No problem when developers can test each other's work this fast.
Shopify's mobile team built an internal tool to eliminate the painful 15-minute rebuild cycle developers faced when reviewing pull requests. The solution leverages their existing CI infrastructure to deliver pre-built app binaries directly to simulators.
Key Takeaways
- Skipped local compilation by downloading pre-built binaries from CI infrastructure
- Single CLI command installs and launches apps on iOS/Android simulators automatically
- GitHub commit statuses show which PRs have tophattable builds ready
- Tool remembers developer preferences like default simulator for faster workflows
Shopify eliminated the mobile code review bottleneck by distributing CI-built binaries through a unified CLI tool that boots simulators and installs apps in seconds.
About This Article
Shopify's mobile developers had to manually tophat builds, and switching git branches would clear their build caches. This meant recompiling everything from scratch, which took up to 15 minutes and left developers stuck waiting instead of working on other parts of the project.
Pedro Piñera's team connected the dev tool to their CI infrastructure. Now it exports pre-built app binaries in the right format for each platform: zipped .app folders for iOS and APK files for Android. Developers access these through a single CLI command.
Developers can now tophat a pull request, branch, or specific build with one command. The tool picks the right simulator, installs the app, and launches it automatically. No local compilation or environment setup needed.