I think we have a few redundant actions in test:e2e:ios:local, they increase the time of build steps.

the flow of script to run local e2e tests for iOS:
"test:e2e:ios:local": "yarn test:e2e:build-app:ios && yarn test:e2e:install-app:ios && TEST_RN_PLATFORM=ios yarn device-tests:local"

• yarn test:e2e:build-app:ios does :

1. Build the app by the react-native run-ios script with --no-packager flag and --configuration Release (it builds JS bundle and copy it to the app in Build Phases script)
2. Build the JS bundle by react-native bundle one more time and copy it to the app (it is already there from step 1)
3. Run cd ./ios/build/gutenberg/Build/Products/Release-iphonesimulator && zip -r $WORK_DIR/ios/Gutenberg.app.zip gutenberg.app it is needed only for CI to upload the app to the sauce labs (this scripts from package.json is not used in ci config https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/gutenberg-mobile/blob/develop/.circleci/config.yml#L137)

• yarn test:e2e:install-app:ios runs only yarn test:e2e:build-app:ios under the hood, so basically runs steps 1, 2, 3 one more time.

• TEST_RN_PLATFORM=ios yarn device-tests:local runs appium tests

I think we could make it much faster by removing points 2 and 3 from yarn test:e2e:build-app:ios and remove the yarn test:e2e:install-app:ios

Since we use caching of app builds on CI but we want to build JS bundle each time, I also set the flag SKIP_BUNDLING in CI config to skip creating of JS bundle during the build step. JS bundle is created in the next step

To test:

1. Local tests

• remove ios/build directory (just to be sure)
• run yarn test:e2e:ios:local
• the app should be built and all tests should pass

2. Green CI

Update release notes:

• If there are user facing changes, I have added an item to RELEASE-NOTES.txt.