Towards continuous deployment of a multilingual mobile app

In this paper, speed and reliability improvements of the deployment of Catrobat's Pocket Code are described. Pocket Code is open source and has over 500 contributors and about 28,000 active installs. It is a multilingual application, also supporting right-to-left languages such asArabic, Farsi, and Sindhi. A major challenge to continuous deployment is the mandatory manual acceptance testing done by product owners. A second major challenge is the maintenance of an up-to-date app description in multiple languages: For Google Play, the app-description including screenshots must be translated to all supported languages. This leads to a huge number of repetitive tasks. These tasks, when carried out by humans are not only prone to errors but also the time needed,and the quality of the outcome differs between their executions. For instance, if screenshots for the descriptions are created manually, deployment is further deferred. Therefore, automatic screenshot creation for all languages is highly desirable. This paper describes our solution for continuous deployment facing these challenges using Fastlane (app-release tool), and Jenkins (continuous integration server), and the staged deployment approach of Google. The latter supports postponing deployment steps that are not easily automatable to later phases. Overall, the approach was successfully implemented for Pocket Code. It was also tested with another Catrobat app, Pocket Paint. This shows, the approach can be transferred to fit the deployment process of other multilingual apps