Valuable insights about mobile CI/CD use in the enterprise

In a recent report about mobile CI/CD, which is a rare sight, highly valuable insights were shared about mobile CI/CD use in various organizations.

I wanted to reproduce certain parts of the report to point out the current trends in the market and raise a discussion on these findings.

You can find the quotes and the insights from the report followed by my commentary.

What do you think about it?
Just share your opinions in the comments.

How are the mobile CI/CD tools set up in the organizations?

“As the mobile teams get larger, which is usually an indication of a larger organization like a multinational enterprise, the on-premise usage gets more prominent.

Since the on-premise and the private cloud options consist 68% of the responses, we can infer that most respondents prefer to have a tighter control over their mobile CI/CD processes in a controlled environment.

There are several reasons for this preference, but the most important one is that the organizations keep their code repositories internally and do not want to expose them to the external networks in any capacity.”

My take: Mobile CI/CD is not treated differently than other stacks, but it actually requires special care while enterprises are naturally reluctant to move to the cloud. So the tool providers may choose to adapt to this market trend.

The breakdown of the preferred CI/CD tools for mobile CI/CD:

“Even though there are several dedicated mobile CI/CD tools like Appcircle, Bitrise and Codemagic, their combined usage only account to 22% in the surveyed organizations.

In the General-Purpose CI/CD tools category, the diversity is high considering that this only includes the tools that are specifically used for mobile CI/CD.

Along with the usage percentages, this indicates that there is a certain need that outweighs the benefits of the dedicated mobile CI/CD tools to use general-purpose CI/CD tools instead.

In the next insight, we see the reason for this preference regardless of the fact that the mobile-specialized tools (Appcircle, Bitrise, Codemagic) are a much better fit for developer-managed mobile CI/CD pipelines.”