Emerge's Bits & Bytes: October 2024

Happy Halloween from your friends at Emerge! 🎃👻🧛🏼‍♂️💀 We can’t believe it’s already the end of October— nothing as spooky as the passage of time 😳💀

This month we introduced Emerge's newest product: Build Distribution 🛰️ to help you effortlessly share the most up-to-date builds with your team.

Some key features:

• Install app builds via QR code scanning, direct download links, or through our web UI
• Distribute iOS & Android builds from a single, unified integration
• Easy SSO authentication & simplified design making it easy for users of all technical levels to install app builds
• Automatically distribute builds directly from your existing CI/CD pipelines, including popular tools and our own Emerge pipeline
• In-app update prompts: Our SDKs integrate seamlessly with your apps to automatically prompt users when a new build is available

With just 1 integration, Emerge can help iOS & Android devs with: app size, startup time, snapshot testing, dead code deletion & now build distribution! Check out the full docs to learn more and get started 🤠

What we're building

Our new Snapshot History feature lets you see the visual history for any of your components on a timeline, and we’ll even tell you when a component was renamed across versions! All you need to do is set a previousSha value, and we'll generate a history for that specific preview starting from a given upload.

We launched a new dropdown in Android Performance Analysis where you can view and download Perfetto traces of specific test iteration runs. By looking at a much more detailed view compared to the differential flame graph in the Emerge UI, you can dive deeper into what could be responsible for regressions or improvements in app startup time.

The Network tab is now available for both iOS and Android Performance Analysis! This feature captures and displays all network activity during your test runs, making comparing network behavior between builds easier. You can now quickly identify all network requests made in a specific perf test and quickly analyze changes in network requests across builds.

Our latest release includes performance improvements to make ETTrace even lower overhead, as well as fixes for deadlocks and memory leaks when using the multithreaded option.

What we're writing

People always love to point out the size difference between Android and iOS apps, but the real difference is smaller than you think.

Read about why Compose Previews can be utilized beyond just building UIs, in cases such as fixing crashes, handling edge cases, and more.

The Proton VPN iOS app was reduced in size by 50 MB. Or was it? We wrote a deep dive to give more context to the story and find out.

What we're reading

• Android 15's app archiving feature works with all Android apps, unlike the Play Store's version
• Faster iOS Networking with Shared Dictionary Compression
• AI Flame Graphs
• How to use Cursor for iOS development

App finds of the month

As usual, we received the bat signal this month for a few different app analyses, including for the Trainline app on iOS at a whopping 342 MB. Check out the full thread on Twitter or Thread Reader.

Just for fun, we also started a new "Guess the App" series 🕵️‍♂️ You can read the threads for the first and second apps so far.

AH! Jump scare! Stay spooky out there 👻

(he doesn't know this is in here, plz don't fire me 👉👈)

Hope everyone enjoyed these Bits and Bytes ❤️