jan_g

As a growing company we've recently been hiring new people and I've been involved in hiring a frontend lead who will be responsible for mobile and web apps. Up until now, the engineering team consisted of three developers and we've mostly focused on backend and devops, where we've aimed to automate everything we could. We've also created a prototype-ish mobile app (using React Native), where we've been using Fastlane to automate building and releasing. It took some time to set it up, but it felt normal to me to do it, because of my experience using CI/CD for everything else.

Now, back to hiring the frontend lead. What struck me as a surprise was that vast majority of candidates (most of them quite experienced) haven't setup or used automation for the mobile apps they've been working on. In essence, there was a single person in the team that did the releases using XCode/Android studio. One candidate said that she had tried to setup Fastlane, but gave up somewhere in the middle due to signing/certificate issues. Then went back to using XCode where it just works.

So, my question is: is using the XCode/Android studio for builds and releasing the norm in the industry? Do people avoid automation for mobile due to it being too hard/clunky?