Visible

When dealing with mobile apps and hardware devices which always need to be in sync the team at Visible turned to Shorebird to help their release process go smoother.
Highlights

- Over 200,000 patches deployed to the Visible customer base over a 4 month period.

- 48 distinct patches created and deployed over 4 months resulting in over a month and a half of saved deployment time

Visible cover image

Visible is on a mission to transform the way we understand and manage energy-limiting conditions like Long Covid and ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis). With over 100 million people around the world living with these illnesses, many have been left without recognition, support, or the tools they need to navigate their health. Founded by Harry Leeming, who developed Long Covid following a mild infection, Visible combines wearable technology and data science to make the invisible—visible. The platform empowers people living with chronic illness to measure and manage their symptoms, and contributes to research that can drive real change in healthcare.

We’re building the tools for these conditions. For us, our doctors, researchers, and the world at large.

  • Visible Team

The Challenge: Rapid Iteration in a High-Need Health Context

When you’re building technology for people managing chronic illness, responsiveness matters. The team at Visible moves quickly to learn from users, improve their product, and ship updates that make a real impact on people’s daily lives.

But the traditional app store release cycle made it hard to keep up with the needs of their customers.

We iterate quite quickly—sometimes with the intention to release weekly or a few times a month as we learn from our users. With store releases, we sometimes had to wait a few days to get the app to a testing track and then another week to get to production.

  • Dominik Roszkowski, Lead Engineer at Visible

Beyond new features, quick bug fixes were equally important—especially in a health context where users depend on the app to track vital information.

As with every software product, there are bugs. These bug fixes have to go through the same approval flow as features which can slow down our response time.

  • Dominik Roszkowski, Lead Engineer at Visible

The Solution: Seamless Over-the-Air Updates with Shorebird

Visible integrated Shorebird into their CI pipeline to streamline their releases. With Shorebird, the team can push updates—both features and fixes—directly to users, bypassing the delays of traditional app store deployments.

“Shorebird was a life changer for us,” said Roszkowski. “Now we can iterate much quicker. From the developer perspective, it’s really seamless. We created a set of CI jobs that makes publishing and patching with Shorebird incredibly easy.”

By having Shorebird as a new tool in their development toolbox the Engineering team at Visible is able to stay ahead of their customers needs. By combining their analytics that they already track in Mixpanel and Intercom they are able to react to customer issues in as close to real time as possible and allows them to see the delivery and adoption of their patches.

Shorebird helped us tremendously and became a verb in our team—‘let’s shorebird it’ is a normal term for us now.

  • Dominik Roszkowski, Lead Engineer at Visible

The Impact: Speed, Reliability, and Empathy-Driven Development

With Shorebird, Visible can move at the pace of its mission. They’re delivering updates faster, addressing user needs more responsively, and avoiding the unnecessary delays around review cycles for simple fixes. That agility is essential when building tools for a medically under served population—especially when many team members are also patients themselves.

Visible is more than a health tech startup—it’s a movement. And Shorebird helps them keep that movement in motion.

Shorebird allows you update your Flutter apps instantly, over the air. It takes less than 5 minutes to integrate and complies with Apple and Google store policies.
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