Of all the famous laws in software development (Moore’s law, Murphy’s law, Cole’s Law, etc.), the one Abel and I like to reference the most is Hofstadter’s Law, which aptly states:
“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law”
Because this cheeky, recursive adage is so often true in the real world, it’s fun to highlight those rare moments where we can beat Hofstadter at his own game. With that in mind, I’d like to share our experience of partnering with Codemagic to bring the ease of deployment to FlutterFlow, and how together we completed a 6 week project in under half the time!
At their core, both FlutterFlow and Codemagic exist to reduce the frustration and unnecessary complexity that comes with building and launching mobile apps. Codemagic to make deployment painless, and FlutterFlow to make building apps effortless. By integrating with Codemagic, we wanted to bring their deployment magic to our users, and allow them to publish their apps with a single click of a button.
Abel and I had already used Codemagic at a startup we worked on previously, and it made our lives way easier then. So we were excited to connect with Martin (CEO behind Codemagic) to explore the integration opportunities.
Given the difficulties of dealing with mobile app stores (particularly iOS), and considering how unique and complex FlutterFlow apps can be, we assumed that supporting deployment would be a hefty undertaking.
To our surprise, after a productive chat with Martin and Mikhail (CTO), we discovered that we could use
Codemagic’s existing APIs to automate almost all of our deployment process. Associating a GitHub repo, adding an application, building the app, and publishing to the app stores were only a few API calls away. So we signed up for their business plan and got started!
Daniel, our amazing intern at the time, worked closely with the Codemagic team to build out the integration. The Codemagic team was very helpful throughout the process and even improved their API and documentation to make the integration even easier. In the end, he was able to complete the integration in…
...3 weeks end-to-end! Here you can see the end result inside of FlutterFlow:
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Codemagic to enable painless and easy deployments! It’s a feature that users love, and we were so happy to deliver it ahead of schedule. It’s not often your product roadmap can look Hofstadter in the eye and live to tell the tale, but it certainly helps when you can use a bit of magic 😉.
