Mobile bank N26 reduced its app build and testing times significantly after moving to a cloud-based platform that helps automate aspects of mobile app development.

The Berlin-based bank’s development team increased app store releases by 200% while decreasing testing time by 80% and build times by 50%, Dama Damjanovic, principal engineer at N26, told Bank Automation News. He credits those productivity gains to the automation offered by cloud-based mobile development tool Bitrise.

“Right now, there is increased demand for digital banking, and with it, increased pressure to constantly be releasing updates to app stores,” Damjanovic told BAN. “Before Bitrise, we released to the app stores every three weeks, but after gradually automating and expanding security checks, we’ve reached a stable, almost weekly release cadence.”

Mobile app development isn’t as simple as turning code over to Apple or Android, said Rik Haandrikman, vice president of growth at Bitrise.

“In most cases, it’s a really complex process involving multiple teams, a ton of different tooling, a ton of different processes that all kind of need to fit together,” Haandrikman told BAN. “Bitrise automates those processes from end to end.”

Bitrise connects to tools and teams used by mobile developers and helps to speed development by making processes repeatable and automated, he added. For instance, mobile users often have to run multiple testing services, and the Bitrise platform connects to these services to expedite the testing.

“You’re testing for iOS and Android, which is also like wildly different,” Haandrikman said. “Then you’re connecting to device farms, which is like this crazy, mobile-specific thing where you have data centers with racks upon racks on racks of all different physical mobile devices. It is complicated, and because it’s complicated, there’s space for something like Bitrise to come in, and to connect to and automate across all of those processes and tools.”

Bitrise is categorized as a continuous integration and continuous delivery solution, which is typically used for DevOps. Codefresh, Copado DevOps platform, CloudBees and CircleCI are competitors in this space, according to consulting firm Gartner.

N26 chose Bitrise because the tool is built specifically for mobile rather than adapted to accommodate mobile, Damjanovic said.

The mobile bank has raised $1.7 billion across 10 funding rounds, according to Crunchbase, and plans to go public within the year, according to published reports.