Emerge's Bits & Bytes: December 2024

We can't believe it's already the end of 2024! This year was a huge one for Emerge Tools, one where we:

• Launched two new products, Reaper and Build Distribution
• Launched our Indie and Open Source subscription plans
• Built our own Hacker News app
• Processed 3,000,000 builds on Emerge
• Hit 10,000 X followers (this week!)

This month, we also celebrated the 4-year founding anniversary of Emerge Tools! We're so lucky to be on this journey with all of you, and we can't wait to see what's in store for us for many years to come. You can read more from our CEO on LinkedIn here 🎉

What we're building

For teams like OpenAI and Handshake, our snapshot approach makes for "effortless" snapshot testing. But we understand that many teams don't have robust Preview coverage or maybe have invested in libraries like swift-snapshot-testing or Paparazzi.

To solve these cases, we're excited to announce Bring Your Own (BYO) Snapshots! If you already have snapshot tests in place, you can now upload any images to Emerge's Snapshots and take advantage of our infrastructure and UI.

Performance profiles are designed to quickly assess the performance of your app's startup by launching it on a physical device and measuring its performance. This was previously only available for iOS apps, but is now also available for Android!

We added a new dropdown filter to sort by app version on the Dashboard graph page, so now you can see all builds for a specific version and how its size changes with each build.

What we're writing

We sat down with our friends at OpenAI to chat about improving mobile development workflows, optimizing preview-driven development, and enhancing snapshot testing for reliable UI validation.

Learn how to automate unit tests for Xcode previews to catch layout issues early, ensure reliability, and save valuable debugging time.

A new way to use Emerge Snapshots by integrating custom snapshot images into your testing workflow to compare and validate UI changes with precision.

This month, we launched a new Emerge Tools overview video to give new users a look into all six of our products we currently offer. Check it out!

What we're reading

• How Chrome doubled its Speedometer scores on Android
• App downloads decline 2.3% in 2024, but consumer spending grows to $127B
• How we think about Threads' iOS performance

App find of the month

You better strap in for this one!! This month, we were tagged on Threads to analyze the Intesa Sanpaolo iOS app, coming in at 699 MB. Once there, we found a few different files that definitely shouldn't have been in there. We saw someone close to the source say that this whole incident has been referred to as "burp-gate." Check out the full thread on Twitter or Thread Reader to understand why 👀

Hope everyone enjoyed these Bits and Bytes ❤️ and Happy New Year! 🎉