Summit Speaker Spotlight Series: Runtastic

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This year’s Mobile DevOps Summit theme is ‘Accelerating your Mobile App Success’ so we sat down with Mohga Gamea, Technical Product Manager at Runtastic GmbH, to talk about all things mobile. 

Runtastic GmbH is a digital health and fitness company from Austria that was bought by adidas in 2015 and rebranded to adidas Runtastic. Their two apps, ‘adidas Running’ and ‘adidas Training’ help aspiring athletes track their runs, their bodyweight training sessions and share goals and successes with a global community. 

Mohga’s session: ‘A Runtastic story: The one where we migrated 200+ repos to Bitrise and still kept our sanity!’. Mohga and her colleague Mansi Shah, iOS Software Engineer, Thomas Maier, Android Software Engineer, and Yen-Chia Lin, iOS Software Engineer, will co-host this session on day one of the Summit: October 4th at 1.30 pm GMT. Register now to hear them speak: https://summit.bitrise.io/page/2783515/register 

15 quick interview questions with Mohga Gamea, Technical Product Manager at Runtastic‍

1. No. of apps Runtastic develop

Runtastic has two main apps: adidas Running and adidas Training

2. No. of downloads of Runtastic apps

An incredible 364 million downloads and 197 million registered users worldwide.

3. What review score do you get on App Store and Google Play

Both Runtastic apps get an incredible 4.7/5 on the App Store and 4.5/5 on Google Play.

4. What does app success look like to your Runtastic app?

From an engineering perspective, in order to assess the quality of their software engineering processes, Runtastic focuses on different DORA metrics such as Cycle-Time, Mean-Time-To-Recover, Deployments, etc. From a business perspective, their focus is on monthly active users and Net-proceeds. This is all besides, user satisfaction and reviews on the App Store and Google Play as well as speaking with customers and hearing their success stories. The sports apps team regularly reaches out to customers at random for feedback and this is a great source of honest feedback. 

5. How many people work in your DevOps team? (And more specifically, your Mobile DevOps team) 

Runtastic split their mobile team of 26 people 50/50 between iOS developers and Android developers and has a total of 82 people on the engineering team.

6. What is the title of your Mobile DevOps Summit 2023 session?

Session title: A Runtastic story: The one where we migrated 200+ repos to Bitrise and still kept our sanity!

Session date: October 4th, 2023 at 1.30 pm GMT

Session hosts: Mohga Gamea, Mansi Shah, Thomas Maier, and Yen-Chia Lin

Session description: In this session, the Runtastic Mobile Core Services team is sharing their migration experience from Jenkins to Bitrise, along with an overview of the Mobile CI/CD setup.

The following aspects will be covered:

  • The in-house solution to migrate 200+ repos for mobile platforms (i.e.: iOS & Android).
  • The tooling and automation built around it.
  • Change governance process across 200+ bitrise.yml manifests.
  • Verifying & testing pipeline changes before rollout to production.
  • Tips & tricks, learnings & best practices gathered along the way.

3 key takeaways from this session:

1. Building Mobile DevOps at scale

2. Generating Bitrise workflows & pipelines from templates

3. Enhancing Developer Productivity and experience with Automation

7. Without giving too much away, what tips and trends do you plan to talk about in your session?

The main story we’re going to focus on is how we managed to do the migration (from our old platform to Bitrise) efficiently while taking into consideration the developer experience. 

“The main thing we want to share in the session is how engineers can go through such a thing [like migrating 200+ repo’s] without having to go through a cumbersome process – we wanted it to be hassle-free for our engineers creating & maintaining the solution and of course those using it.” Mohga Gamea, Technical Product Manager, Runtastic

8. How long have you been using Bitrise to develop your mobile apps?

Runtastic has been using Bitrise since 2021, their first workflow with Bitrise went live in November 2021.

9. How has the Bitrise platform helped you accelerate your app’s success?

Before migrating to Bitrise the Mobile Core Services team had huge productivity issues: 

“We were using 40% of our productivity on CI/CD maintenance, but as soon as we migrated [to Bitrise], most of these issues seemed to disappear. The developer experience has drastically improved in many aspects and we were able to rectify 27.3% of our productivity.” Mohga Gamea, Technical Product Manager, Runtastic

10. How long have you been in the mobile app development industry?

Mohga started working in tech 12 years ago but has worked in mobile development for the last 9 years.

11. What was your previous role before working at Runtastic?

Before Mohga’s role as Technical Product Manager at Runtastic, she was an Application Developer at IBM.

12. What other apps/mobile DevOps teams do you look up to that embody ‘app success’ in your opinion?

Here are some resources Mohga looks to on a regular basis for the latest trends in mobile DevOps: howtheySRE, howtheyDevops, DevopsCube, and DevopsDudes. As well as following tech giants like AWS and Atlassian. 

13. How important do you think it is to have a mobile-first strategy?

Runtastics has embraced the mobile-first model from the very beginning. 

“Considering the nature of the sports apps and target users, being mobile-first aligns perfectly with our vision and maximizes our customer reachability, especially Gen Z users who happen to have a significant presence among our user segments.” Mohga Gamea, Technical Product Manager, Runtastic

14. We know you’re speaking at the Summit but what sessions are you looking forward to attending?

Here are the sessions Mohga is most looking forward to – they’re both happening on day 2 (Oct 5th) of the Summit:

From Android to Multiplatform: leveraging the full potential of Kotlin. With Ibramhim Gharbi, Mobile Software Architect, and Yassine Benabbas, DevRel at Worldline | October 5th at 4.20 pm GMT

Modularization is always a good option. With Marcin Siemaszko, Software Architect iOS at Netguru | October 5th at 2.40 pm GMT

Check out the full list of speakers in the Summit agenda: https://summit.bitrise.io/agenda 

15. When you’re not developing kick-ass apps, what do you like to do in your free time?

Right now, Mohga is training her cat to swim so she can take her on hikes in the beautiful Austrian countryside where she lives.

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Don’t forget to check out the full session with Mohga, Yen-Chia, Thomas, and Mansi, on October 4th at 1.30 pm GMT: https://summit.bitrise.io/agenda/session/1203939 

Haven’t already registered for the Mobile DevOps Summit 2023? Register now: https://summit.bitrise.io/page/2783515/register