Hike is an user-centric, mobile-first product, where user experience is the top priority. Hike started as an instant messaging app but during the course of the last four years, it has evolved into a messaging platform that offers a bouquet of features and services on top of messaging.

As a part of quality team, it becomes our primary goal to make sure that app is doing well in terms of performance for a 100+ million user base with an average smartphone cost of $120. We as a product want to achieve and solve lot of user problems but with a constraint of app running with limited device resources.

So the question arise, how do we achieve this goal?

Now, every night, every Sprint (2 weeks) and every public release (monthly), we run our automated perf tests. We measure our app's performance using several app specific use-cases on 4 key areas:

• CPU,
• Memory
• Battery
• Network (data consumption)

We also benchmark the following scenarios for app latency:

• App launch time upon Force Stop
• App launch time upon Force Kill
• App's busiest screen opening time
• Scrolling latency in different parts of the app
• Contact loading time in Compose screen

Embracing the fail-fast, fail-early principle, we now provide the necessary feedback to the developers as quickly as possible to avoid downstream delays.

As India's first (and perhaps only) home-grown messaging platform, Hike messenger has been at the forefront of delivering user delight and technological innovation. In achieving our goals, our foray down the Devops route has been an enriching and empowering experience for us as an organisation.  In this conversation, we would like to offer an insight into our journey, the challenges we addressed (and are probably still trying to); all the while ensuring the quality of our user experience and product deliverables is not compromised.

Join this session to understand the typical challenges in building a DevOps culture in a startup mould with high product churn. Plus the interesting tweaks we came up with to setup CI pipeline for Mobile Apps, which has various client builds which need to be in sync with server builds.