Emerge's Bits & Bytes: January 2025

Happy New Year from Emerge! Earlier this month, we welcomed our newest team member, Nelson, formerly from Gradle and Square! 🎉

Some of the team was able to meet in NYC to give Nelson a warm welcome, even while the weather outside was far from warm 🥶

What we're building

With Microsoft App Center retiring at the end of March, we're offering our build distribution product for FREE to anyone who'd like to use it! All you have to do is visit emergetools.com and click on the "Get started" button to create an account and upload your first build 🤩

We recently launched our iOS Hacker News app for beta on TestFlight! It's been really cool to see all the feedback coming in and even cooler to see people making PRs to improve the app 💯 Join the beta and try it out for yourself!

We cut a new release of Android Snapshots with some improvements! @PreviewParameter annotated params are now supported and will generate a unique snapshot for each individual item. This allows you to easily preview lots of different variants of your snapshot with mock data.

Additionally, previews with `device` parameters are now 1:1 with their exact dimensions for better viewing.

Being our newest product, we're excited to continue adding features to build distribution. This month, we added build distro PR comments (below), changed the download name to be more clear, and we now support distributing both APK and AAB uploads

We added a new module in Reaper for Recently Detected Types so you can track recent code usage along with the first time it was seen. As you collect more Reaper data, this can help you understand what code takes longer to be seen.

What we're writing

Late last year, our co-founder Noah attended SwiftLeeds in Leeds, England and presented this talk. It's a topic we're pretty passionate about, and we've written a few blog posts about it too! ⬇️

The Surprising Cost of Protocol Conformances in Swift

How To Speed Up Swift By Ordering Conformances

What we're reading

• Optimizing Function Layout for Mobile Applications
• How we sped up Android and iOS builds by 50%
• A Deeper Look into Node.js Docker Images: Help, My Node Image Has Python!
• Efficient Profile-Guided Size Optimization for Native Mobile Applications

App find of the month

It really is always the banking apps 🤦 This month, we were tagged on X to figure out why the UBS iOS app is almost 800 MB, which echoes a lot of previous banking app analysis too. Check out the full thread on Twitter or Thread Reader to understand why 👀

Hope everyone enjoyed these Bits and Bytes ❤️