Hey all, so excited to be featured here on Product Hunt!
I've been working on Roboto for some time now after leaving my full time job as an app developer and designer. I became tired of developer tools not being as easy to use as they could be.
One particular pain point was getting beta builds to our testers and deploying to the App Store. We worked in a team, so creating builds would require checking out each other's changes, ensuring we had the right profiles on our machines, archiving, uploading, and so on. Yuck.
You might be thinking "you need to use CI - Jenkins!", and we tried it. I was at an agency with multiple apps on the go every few months, and getting Jenkins set up and working in a way we wanted was a massive pain in the ass. It was a hot mess of plugins, hacks and external services such as TestFlight and HockeyApp. Other services that offered an alternative — such as Travis and CircleCI — would require access to your private source code, signing identifies, etc. They were also expensive.
Paying someone else to compile your code made little sense to us, as we had perfectly capable Macs of our own. Roboto is built so that we manage the bits you'd want us to manage: hosting of the IPA and APK packages, installation pages, emails, web interface, users, etc. You then run the "Roboto Worker" on a Mac of your choice, which does all the compilation and source code management locally. The upside of this is we never see your private data, and your builds can make full use of your hardware — no sharing with other developers
We have big plans for Roboto. What you see today is just the beginning. Whilst I think sharing future plans publicly can sometimes set people up for heartbreak (scrapped features, delays, etc) I thought it was important to say our goal is to become de facto standard of deploying and managing your mobile apps. That's a tall order, and we're not there yet, but here's a couple of things already in the works that brings us closer to that goal:
- Unit test support.
- iTunes Connect and Play Store management (metadata, screenshots, versions, etc)
- Full build support for Android.
So that's a bit about why Roboto exists. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys think! Happy to answer any questions you guys and gals have. Thanks!
tl;dr: It's an out the box CI tool for mobile apps, TRY IT FREE TODAY.
A great service for iOS developers, with the big advantage of running the builds locally, which means, the source code never leaves your computer.
Check out the great video:
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Very interesting!
What are the restrictions on the number of testers? 100 users ?
@alexbeofficial Those are the number of users you can have assigned to your organisation. That includes testers, admins, developers, etc. There's no hard limit to the number of testers that can install a build (there's installation pages you can get a direct link too) but there is a limit on the number we'll email. Hope that makes sense!
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I've been looking for something (better) in this space. Well done.
Fantastic, this mean i can use this service not only for testing but for selling some apps that are not approved by apple store, can i get more then 100 users ? a package for 500+ users ?
i am looking forward to chat about this with you via DM twitter @ilyashassani
Thanks
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