Adidas: Building cross-platform SDKs for mobile innovation
Adidas is a global leader in the sporting goods industry, offering a broad portfolio of footwear, apparel, and hardware for sport and lifestyle under its core brands adidas and Reebok. The company strives to inspire and enable people to harness the power of sport in their lives, driving innovation and creativity across all its products.
As a large enterprise, Adidas manages an increasing number of web and mobile applications. To reduce maintenance costs and standardize processes, the company required SDKs capable of serving multiple projects consistently. This made strong architecture and comprehensive testing — including unit, integration, and functional tests — indispensable.
The goal was to create SDKs for iOS and Android that would support all Adidas applications as well as integrations by third parties and clients. At the same time, the infrastructure and continuous integration system needed ongoing support and optimization. Among the challenges were tight timing for integrating features into a new app launch, ensuring QA across multiple devices and applications, and coordinating distributed teams across countries and time zones.
Adidas’s mobile development journey
The collaboration began with the development of SDK components to deliver essential features for Adidas’s applications. This included highly customized UI elements, modules for network communications, and customer chat functionality integrated into the SDKs.
In parallel, Jenkins build and deploy jobs were set up to automate delivery and improve efficiency in the development lifecycle. These efforts strengthened the continuous integration pipeline and reduced release times.
The project also introduced Docker and Kubernetes to reinforce the infrastructure, providing greater flexibility in managing environments and a more scalable foundation for future developments.
Finally, Grafana was integrated to monitor backend systems and logs, combined with issue management practices to detect problems early and ensure a more stable service.
Technology
Technologies used: Android & iOS native development (Java, Swift, Objective-C), Docker, Kubernetes, Grafana
Results
- Development of SDKs supporting all Adidas applications on iOS and Android
- Delivery of key features for the newest Adidas mobile app
- Improved QA processes across devices and applications
- Standardization of components and processes across projects
- Enhanced infrastructure with CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, and monitoring tools
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