Fastlane for mobile automations

[shamilovtim]

Fastlane has thousands of contributors and is used by hundreds of thousands of project in ios, android, react native, flutter, ionic etc. It has the efforts of the whole mobile development community who for years have maintained scripts and thousands of plugins that are kept up to date with breaking changes from Apple and Google. It would be challenging for a small react native template to both duplicate the offerings of Fastlane and to provide the same types of automations that Fastlane does plus keep up with all of the breaking changes. It should not matter that Fastlane is written in Ruby given that we use YAML, Gradle, Github Actions and other tools frequently without worrying about the language that they're written in.

[maciekstosio]

Hi, thanks for your comment! I'm not sure if I get your concern, fastlane is awesome at what it does - automating deployment. Our ultimate goal is to quickly set up CI. What I mean by that is each project, at some point, needs to set up processes around development. For example, you can imagine that tests, code quality, and previews are done on the feature branch, previewed on QA, and submitted to the store when merging to the release branch. CI is often skipped because of lack of time, and setting it up takes time mostly because it's done rarely. At the same time, it's usually a repetitive process so it could be automated. We don't aim to build a deployment automation tool, for this task, we're going to rely on Expo services, which, to my knowledge, use fastlane under the hood.

[shamilovtim]

That makes sense! I thought I saw some overlap between some shell and node scripts and what Fastlane does but maybe I just misunderstood. For mobile automations if using Expo do those use the Expo paid cloud servers (and not Github Actions)?