17: Building Apps at Spotify Scale

What happens when the standard tooling for iOS and Android just doesn't cut it anymore? What’s it like to maintain an app when there are literally thousands of commits every week? How do you develop your feature without worrying about everybody else’s feature, when at the end of the day, you’re shipping a single, massive app? In other words, what’s it really like to build apps at Spotify’s scale?

Host Dave Zolotusky talks with Patrick Balestra, a staff engineer on our client platform team, whose job is to make sure every Spotify developer has a great experience building, no matter what Spotify app they’re building for. They talk about adopting Bazel, reducing local build times with remote caching, managing multiple monorepos and zillions of dependencies, doing big tech migrations (Objective-C to Swift, Java to Kotlin) without slowing down, open sourcing our tools, and contributing to the Mobile Native Foundation.

Learn more about how we build mobile apps at Spotify:

• Kodeco: Building with Bazel: Online tutorial made in collaboration with Spotify
• BazelCon 2022: Our BazelCon talk about driving architectural improvements with dependency metrics
• XCRemoteCache: Open source remote cache tool for Xcode projects that reuses target artifacts generated on a remote machine, served from a simple REST server
• XCLogParser: Open source tool to parse Xcode and xcodebuild logs stored in the xcactivitylog format
• 2022 Mobile Ecosystem: Data from the Mobile Native Foundation's first mobile ecosystem survey
• My Beat: Patrick Balestra
• Mobile development posts on the Spotify Engineering Blog

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

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