The beauty of open source software is that innovation can come from anyone, anywhere, and at any time. Over the past year and a half, the fastlane community has embraced this opportunity to make fastlane even better. These community-contributed additions, including approximately 80% of all fastlane actions and spaceship, have already saved millions of precious developer hours!

We love developing fastlane with you and want to empower you with more freedom to help mobile developers and strengthen your bond with them. Today, we’re introducing fastlane plugins – a new, faster way to create actions and connect directly with the fastlane community.

A whole new way to move fastlane forward

fastlane is comprised of hundreds of actions that make app deployment a breeze. From helping you distribute your beta builds to posting notifications in Slack channels, the possibilities of what you can automate to save time are endless! And because fastlane is open, everyone has the power to build on top of it.

Up until now, new actions that were proposed by our passionate community were merged into the main repository. To use them, all fastlane customers would need to upgrade their gems to the latest version. We’re excited to announce we’ve made this process even smoother with the new fastlane plugins architecture.

Think of fastlane plugins like building blocks; they’re a new, modular way to create and distribute actions independently of fastlane itself. In other words, these plugins allow actions to be added faster because they aren’t bundled into the main fastlane repository. Everyone has the power to invent, share, and deploy new plugins in this new architecture without waiting for PRs to be approved and gems to be updated – they’re your fast pass to making a dent in the mobile development universe! And everyone also gets instant access to tons of new actions. So, whether you’re a plugin creator or consumer or both, fastlane plugins are a win-win for the entire fastlane family.