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How Appcircle Empowered Halkbank’s Mobile Team
Explore how Appcircle's platform revolutionized Halkbank mobile app development, boosting efficiency, and cutting costs in this success story
Overview
With roots tracing back to 1938, Halkbank stands as a cornerstone in Turkey’s financial sector. Renowned for its strength and reliability, Halkbank serves a global customer base through a vast network of branches. Halkbank offers comprehensive financial products and services to “make the dreams of Turkish investors’ come true”.
Serving a large user base of over 6.5 million mobile users, Halkbank has been on a continuous quest for innovation. Halkbank has been investing in technology to provide innovative solutions for its customers.
At the forefront of this technological evolution is their mobile app, Halkbank Mobil, boasting over 10 million downloads.
Our journey with Appcircle is more than a technological shift; it’s a strategic decision that has redefined our approach to mobile development. As we look towards the future, Halkbank is poised to navigate the ever-evolving landscape with strategic progress, empowered by the not only by the capabilities of Appcircle’s innovative platform but also by the invaluable mobile DevOps expertise transferred during our onboarding journey. This dual empowerment positions us at the forefront of innovation, ready to embrace the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
Tuncer Demirel
SVP, Digital & Enterprise Applications
Challenges
Halkbank is highly cognizant of the indispensability of DevOps across all stacks and they had been working with Azure DevOps in all their stacks.
However, Halkbank’s mobile development team grappled with the limitations of Azure DevOps. The platform, which is optimized for broader stacks and especially ideal for .NET with built-in tools and workflows that meets many needs just as expected from an adept DevOps platform, required more optimization for mobile DevOps as mobile-specific pipeline steps necessitated the involvement of third-party tools and manual deployment operations, increasing the need for customizations and the management effort. Azure DevOps, being less mobile-focused, also lacked the necessary tools to manage mobile signing identities effectively.
The involvement of multiple third-party tools made establishing a seamless pipeline for mobile apps more challenging and it also introduced external handoffs in areas like testing distribution.
Mac hardware management further compounded challenges, a crucial component for mobile app build, test and deployment operations. Using a more mobile-focused platform could have provided the opportunity to increase the team’s productivity and innovation potential.
Results
Enter Appcircle, a transformative mobile DevOps solution that addressed Halkbank’s specific challenges head-on. Appcircle impeccably replaced Azure DevOps, providing a more tailored and efficient platform for mobile development.
Minimized Infrastructure Maintenance
The liberation from Mac hardware maintenance headaches became a pivotal breakthrough for Halkbank. Appcircle handles all the build operations within the platform itself, without the need for maintaining external infrastructure resources for the build jobs that require macOS. This approach effectively eliminates the need for hands-on oversight of a multitude of build machines, as Appcircle assumes automated control.
What does this mean for Halkbank’s DevOps team? It marks a shift in focus and resource allocation. The once-intensive task of hardware maintenance is now a thing of the past, freeing up valuable resources. The team can redirect this newfound bandwidth towards shaping a more purposeful and impactful trajectory for the mobile development endeavors at Halkbank.
Effective Signing Identity Management
Appcircle, being mobile-specific, delved into the specifics of mobile development intricacies. In particular, it isolated Halkbank from the complexities of signing identity management. Appcircle went above and beyond by automating the iOS signing identity management and renewal processes with the API. This automation not only streamlined operations but enhanced security and compliance in the mobile development pipeline.
Testing Distribution: A Strategic Shift
One of the key transitions was in testing distribution. Halkbank transitioned from App Center, which required accessing the releases over a third-party cloud solution with independent user credentials, to Appcircle which enabled internal access with internal LDAP credentials.
This move streamlined testing processes and fostered enhanced collaboration within the team, creating a more cohesive and controlled testing environment.
A Strategic Partnership for the Highest Productivity and Quality
Appcircle’s user-friendly interface, coupled with additional plugins like the Azure bot code review plugin, became the pillars supporting a newfound flexibility and heightened productivity for the development team. The integration of more automated checkpoints, reviews, and tests elevated both productivity and release quality.
Liberated from the intricacies of hardware management and setting up mobile-specific pipelines, the team now operates with enhanced productivity, laying the groundwork for continued innovation and excellence in mobile development. The overall productivity of Halkbank’s mobile development team experienced a commendable surge, registering an impressive 15% increase.
In essence, Halkbank’s collaboration with Appcircle is a testament to the transformative potential inherent in selecting the right mobile DevOps platform.
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