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Deployment and Release

Shipping React Native professionally means treating release as a controlled system. Builds, signatures, environment configuration, quality gates, store submission, and rollback plans must be documented together.

Release stages​

A practical release model often includes:

  • Development builds for feature work.
  • Internal QA or preview builds.
  • Release candidate builds.
  • Production rollout with staged exposure.

CI/CD expectations​

Your delivery pipeline should automate:

  • Dependency installation.
  • Type checking and linting.
  • Unit and component tests.
  • End-to-end tests for critical flows where feasible.
  • Native build generation.
  • Artifact versioning and storage.

Signing and secrets​

Document ownership and rotation for:

  • iOS signing identities and provisioning.
  • Android keystores.
  • API keys and service credentials.
  • Environment-specific configuration values.

Never let release credentials live only on one engineer's machine.

Versioning strategy​

Make versioning explicit:

  • App store versioning.
  • Build numbers.
  • Branch-to-release mapping.
  • Hotfix handling.
  • Release note ownership.

Store delivery​

Release documentation should explain:

  • How screenshots and metadata are updated.
  • Who approves release candidates.
  • Which checks block store submission.
  • How staged rollout decisions are made.

Over-the-air updates​

If your workflow supports over-the-air updates, define strict rules:

  • Which kinds of changes are allowed.
  • How runtime compatibility is verified.
  • How you can disable or roll back a bad update.
  • How users are informed when a full binary update is required.

Treat OTA as a controlled delivery mechanism, not as a substitute for release discipline.

Release readiness checklist​

  • Quality gates passed.
  • Crash and performance baselines acceptable.
  • Feature flags reviewed.
  • Observability configured.
  • Rollback path documented.

Team rule​

Releases should be repeatable by process, not by memory. If only one person knows how production delivery works, the release system is not ready.

After release design, lock in security and maintenance.