Every mobile app development project requires a set of recurring tasks around integration, testing, deployment, and long-term maintenance. These tasks must be automated across teams of many developers and projects to ensure success. Building a process for these tasks can be time-consuming and require specialized infrastructure experience, but it's critical for any serious app project.
Thankfully, teams don't need to build solutions to these problems themselves, as there are services out there that can help. One such service, Appflow, works directly with your Cordova or Capacitor app to make these tasks easy. This means consistent builds, deploys on every commit, pushing remote app updates in real-time, and automating app store deployment as part of your mobile CI/CD workflow.
What is Mobile DevOps?
Appflow is a Mobile DevOps platform that simplifies many continuous integration and delivery tasks, as well as other important mobile app deployment tasks. These platforms handle the heavy lifting so teams can focus on building their unique app instead of reinventing the wheel. Tasks may include setting up consistent, repeatable mobile build environments, building app binaries and artifacts for iOS, Android, and Web, running tests and scripts on every commit, connecting to existing GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, and other repos, releasing working updates to users in real-time or to the app stores, and managing different versions of apps between testers, stakeholders, and production users.
What is Appflow?
Appflow is the official Mobile DevOps platform built by the Ionic team, focused on bringing powerful workflows to hybrid app developers across Capacitor and Cordova. Whether or not they are using Ionic Framework, Appflow provides a managed mobile build environment that offers consistent and frequently updated iOS, Android, and web build environments. The Appflow team does the hard work of keeping mobile build tools and operating systems up to date and patched for security issues.
How is Appflow Different?
Appflow stands out in the CI/CD and DevOps space as a specialized build service that provides a managed mobile build environment fully managed by the mobile experts at Ionic. It's not just another generic CI/CD tool like Circle CI or GitHub Actions, which merely provide build servers, trigger builds, and hooks for sending those builds elsewhere. Appflow handles deployment of your app, manages build environments, and provides remote app deployment features, making it a one-stop-shop for mobile development teams.
Why Choose Appflow?
While generic CI/CD tools can be used alongside Appflow, they are not a direct replacement. In fact, building a process for these tasks with generic CI/CD tools would require a team of engineers with a different skillset to build and manage the complex chain of tools, operating systems, build environments, app store submission features, remote app deployment, and more. This is why Appflow stands out as a managed mobile build environment that's fully managed by the mobile experts at Ionic.