Thanks for the thoughtful comment - a lot of what you said about testing tooling and AI improvements is absolutely true.
Part of comment related to Ecency mobile app, so I will leave some more notes about our process. Where things differ a bit for production apps like Ecency is that emulators and automated testing don’t fully represent real-world mobile environments. Android alone has thousands of device/OEM combinations, and issues often appear only on specific real devices (memory limits, background restrictions, camera APIs, push notifications, etc.). These are difficult to reproduce purely through emulation. You cannot avoid using emulators/simulators on mobile development, it is done already since inception of the app.
Another thing to add, Hive apps add extra complexity: wallet signing, broadcasting transactions, interacting with multiple RPC nodes, and integrating with tools like Keychain or HiveAuth. Many of these flows involve real blockchain interactions that can't always be safely simulated.
Our code is based in React native, in practice there are still platform-specific bugs, native modules, OS changes, and app store constraints that require additional testing and coordination before releases.
Automation, AI, and good test coverage definitely help - but with a production app used by many people (and involving crypto transactions), stability and careful releases still require real-device testing and QA cycles. So we are exploring how to improve those and optimizing.
Appreciate the discussion and ideas around improving development efficiency. Looking forward to test your Android/iOS game, please do share link/listing.
RE: Hive Projects Budget Transparency Meeting