Building a Mobile Platform: Why We Stopped Rebuilding Everything

Intro

At #FORGESOFT, we build projects repeatedly — sometimes from scratch, sometimes alongside clients, and often under tight timelines. Mobile applications are usually at the center of that effort.

We noticed that with each project, we build things differently, lacking consistency in workflows, code practices, architecture, and third-party tools. Managing a growing number of repositories becomes challenging and hard to support long-term.

To tackle these growing challenges, we decided to take a systematic approach. This series of articles will outline how we addressed the issue.

Where to begin

With every new mobile app being built, the same questions appear:

• How do we do CI?
• What does the release flow look like? Do we do one or two-week releases?
• How do we distribute builds internally and to the app stores?
• Where do iOS certificates live? Do we use match for this or try something else?
• And more..