Mobile application development isn't like building websites. Mobile developers like you live on the bleeding edge, like pioneers or pirates. Mobile developers don't wear ties to work.
But when I talk to mobile developers I find that a lot of them don't know how to choose the right tools, so I'm giving you a cheat code here that will save you time and headaches and let you ship your apps faster.
If you like spending your time configuring your Git repository, you'll probably hate the rest of this, so feel free to close the tab. But keep reading if you can find better ways to use your time than hand-tuning Git garbage collection.
Yes, Git is super popular and has some cool features. All the cool kids use Git. Heck, we do a lot of Git hosting at ProjectLocker. I personally use Git every day. But I'll confirm what you may already suspect if you've used Git: Git simply isn't the best choice for a lot of mobile projects.
And I'm not just talking about the syntax and wacky error messages.
First of all: Git just isn't that good at handling binary files. Yes, in 2014. There are lots of strategies for working around this limitation, but the best case right now is a funky workaround requiring you to hand-tune the parameters of your repository. Any way you slice it, Git is not the best place to version your images, sounds, videos, and other multimedia assets that go into your mobile app.
Second: Git is awful at large repositories. What is a "large repository" to Git? A few hundred megabytes. Yes, megabytes. In our experience, quite a few mobile apps end up with large codebases. Those multimedia assets really add up. And if your repository gets too large, performance will suffer and you'll have to spend a bunch of time hand-tuning your repository.
So Git may work for your particular project, but you need to be aware of these caveats.
On the other hand, if your team likes to be able to just dump all the source files into the repository without thinking too much about the details, you might want to choose Subversion.
Subversion even lets you do things like archive old builds after submitting to the app stores. You don't have to worry about how big they are, or whether your source control is going to stop working if you add too much data to the repository.
So the cheat code is: understand your project and pick the right source control for that project. Really simple, but you have to use a provider that doesn't try to force you into one specific tool.
All of which to say that we at ProjectLocker don't believe there is a source control system that is best for every project. That's why we offer you the freedom to choose between Git and Subversion; you can even mix and match in your account.
If you use ProjectLocker, you will be able to make smarter choices that will help you ship better code.
You can use our automated importer to bring your code into ProjectLocker, or you can drop us a line and we'll help you directly. Because we're people and not robots, and every team is different.
These are just some of the reasons that over 100,000 people use ProjectLocker for their repositories.
Get a repository for your mobile project today. It's free for 15 days, so there's no risk. 