Overview
Meet Max Lapides
Before Tonal, I worked mainly with web technologies, building websites and web applications. Now, I am managing the mobile engineering team here at Tonal. I love building apps that are easy and fun to use, and I love building teams to engineer them.
Distributing builds internally was possible, but it was difficult. There was no easy way to get people to update their build regularly. Applivery has made this very simple, and now the whole team is consistently up-to-date with the latest build.
Our testing process at Tonal is very smooth now! Applivery has been a trusted service since we set it up.
Max Lapides
Mobile Engineering Manager at Tonal
What can you tell us about the technology and tools that Tonal uses to develop your products?
We are building our mobile app with Flutter, which has made it easy for us to ship to both iOS and Android with feature parity across both platforms. We launched on both platforms the first day we released our app, and every 2 weeks since then we’ve pushed an update to both platforms simultaneously. We are using Bitrise to run our CI tasks, which has been effective and reliable.
What brought you to Applivery?
Once we got set up with Bitrise, we started to use it to generate scheduled nightly builds so we could test our work for the day on our mobile devices. But, the process of downloading a new build every night was cumbersome and many of our internal testers ended up not updating regularly enough. We needed a system that made it easy for us to update our test build on a nearly daily basis. When we got an email from Bitrise telling us about the new Applivery integration, we started looking into it immediately!
How do you use Applivery today? Did we solve a critical problem?
We use Applivery to ship “nightly” builds to our internal mobile team. This includes the software engineers on the team, but it also includes the product managers, product designers, and some key managers and executives.
Applivery makes it very easy to onboard new team members and keeps everyone up-to-date. Now, when we merge a new feature into the project, we can tell our designers that it will be ready for them to test out when the daily build is pushed to Applivery. This keeps our review cycles short and helps keep everyone in the loop.
Do you use Applivery in combination with any other products?
We use Applivery in combination with Bitrise. Bitrise builds our app, and sends the builds to Applivery! We also use Sentry to collect errors in the wild. Any build will report errors to Sentry.
Is there anything you do today that is more efficient, or couldn't have been done or was really difficult before we came?
Distributing builds internally was possible, but it was difficult. There was no easy way to get people to update their build regularly. Applivery has made this very simple, and now the whole team is consistently up-to-date with the latest build.
Why did Tonal choose us?
- Automatic Updates
Having the possibility to automatically update all users when uploading new versions of the app streamlines app development and testing.
- Password protected Apps
The integration with third-party services such as Bitrise is smooth and transparent, allowing automatic deployment of builds and thus reducing the effort of development teams.
- Customer Support
Applivery makes it very easy to onboard new team members and keeps everyone up-to-date based on the team they belong to. Segmented deployments and group-based distribution are awesome features.
