
Buddybuild: Build, deploy and gather feedback for iOS and Android apps - benhoyt
http://buddybuild.com/
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dennispi
Thanks for posting buddybuild Ben!

At a high level, Buddybuild is a mobile focused continuous integration,
continuous deployment and user feedback solution that takes minutes to setup.

We want to help mobile developers build better apps, faster. To do so, we've
built an end-to-end system that unlocks a simple workflow: a simple 'git push'
to build, deploy, gather feedback and iterate.

As we tried using existing solutions, we felt that there was an unnecessary
amount of complexity involved in creating builds, getting those builds to
users and then getting meaningful and actionable feedback from those users.

If you're an iOS developer, you'll never have to manage new devices, UDIDs,
provisioning profiles or signing identities again. New testers and their
devices are automatically provisioned on your behalf through buddybuild.

Further, buddybuild’s deployment service can deploy instantly on every build,
every night, or at the push of a button.

By simply taking a screenshot, testers can send graphically annotated
screenshots and feedback notes. If your app crashes, buddybuild will trace
back and highlight the exact line of source code that caused the crash, tell
you which users were affected, and how many times the crash has occurred.

Finally, get a heads up on any potential breaking changes in Xcode. Within 48
hours of the release, buddybuild automatically takes your most recent
successful build, builds and runs tests against the latest version of Xcode
(including betas!) and emails you the results.

Of course, built in integrations with your favorite services - GitHub,
BitBucket, GitLab, Slack, JIRA Pivotal Tracker, Slack, and HipChat.

With buddybuild, you no longer need to cobble together disparate systems to be
able to iterate quickly on mobile.

If you want to get a sense for the experience, you checkout
[http://www.buddybuild.com/demo](http://www.buddybuild.com/demo)

Happy to answer any questions people might have!

~~~
mimurchison
Nice to see BB here! We used BB to build our iOS app; over 3 months, it made
the process of iterating, deploying and collecting feedback on our prototypes
incredibly easy. Great product and a very proactive team. One feature that BB
has that is particularly useful is the ability to deploy test builds to
various groups. We deploy a build internally to our team group at least once
daily, and then another more polished version to our most avid beta-testers at
least once a week.

~~~
giarc
What does BB offer that TestFlight doesn't? I currently use TestFlight and the
external testing, although requiring beta app review is pretty simple.

~~~
chrisstott
We don't think of it as an either/or (In fact, buddybuild supports deploying
directly to Testflight as well).

Buddybuild's deployment really comes into its own earlier in the dev cycle \-
when you want to deploy to your internal team (who might want to jump to old
builds or different branches) \- when you want to schedule deployments (every
evening for example) \- or when you want to send a build very quickly to
someone.

We've made the onboarding experience for new testers very simple -
automatically handling adding UDIDs to provisioning profile. Also, not having
to install a separate app is very appealing to some people.

We show off that part in our demo :
[http://www.buddybuild.com/demo](http://www.buddybuild.com/demo)

Testflight works really well for very large external test groups.

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andy
I started using them for my apps not too long ago. I sent them some feedback
and they are sending me a Starbucks gift card. Pretty good for a free service.
[https://twitter.com/andytriboletti/status/690604902314315776](https://twitter.com/andytriboletti/status/690604902314315776)

~~~
dennispi
Well, we care deeply about customer experience.. and we're happy to buy our
users coffee when they take the time to send us feedback!

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devbug
Awh man is this cool!

I had a similar idea kicking around for a while (for a different market)
because you end up managing disparate targets (including multiple digital
distributors for one platform) each with their own slightly broken of doing
things. It. Sucks. Hard.

Now that I'm only tangentially involved with the market my previous experience
(of intense pain) is reduced, but has been replaced with iOS and Android.

I'm looking forward to using BuddyBuild for the next app I work on.

How are you handling the Apple side of things? Last I checked, you had to
store full credentials to someone's Apple ID. Looks like you are doing exactly
that.

My big concern is that you're siloing my credentials so they won't get leaked.
How are you doing that?

~~~
chrisstott
We take this very seriously.

At a high level, our front end servers can write credentials, but never read
them.

Only the build machines (which are isolated from the public internet) can
decrypt and use them... and only for a short duration during a build.

A good portion of our infrastructure is built on AWS - where a majority of our
team had worked to build services with similar secure environments.

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bitdeveloper
I just tried this out for my first iOS app. Very cool stuff. Your demo and on-
boarding process is very smooth.

Just a little feedback - I was hesitant to sign up because I didn't want to
love it and find out it is out of my range price-wise. When I saw your comment
about it being free for indie developers, hobbyists, and open source, that's
when I decided to sign up. My general impression with SaaS has often been that
"No price listed" means "This is for enterprise, and you can't afford it." So
you may want to consider saying something about your future pricing
plans/tiers, even if you can't really nail it down right now.

~~~
dennispi
This is really helpful feedback - thanks for taking the time to write it up!
We'll put together a placeholder to help address pricing concerns.

Also, I'm glad to hear that your on-boarding was smooth!

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rafer11
Buddybuild is awesome. We've been using it for a couple of months now. It has
so many great, easy to use features, that are all built in for you, so you
don't get bogged down with tool overload. If anyone's interested, I can go
into more detail about how we use bb.

~~~
benhoyt
I would be very interested, thanks! We're just looking at buddybuild as a
possibility for our new Oyster.com app, and I'm impressed so far.

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onemoresmith
Wish this was around last year when we launched our app - removing the tedium
of build/deploy/versioning to diff groups. Think I'm more excited about
containing the feedback into the workflow. Emails, screenshots and overlays
worked but felt clunky. Bundling all of this together makes sense. Will give
it a try with our next app (note: appreciate the pricing love for indie
developers)

