Hi! So while fastlane is great for automating the parts of the process that usually live in CI, we think a big chunk of the process lies outside of the realm of CI. For example, things like understanding what work is going into the release, communicating progress on manual regression testing, and triaging issues as they come in from internal or external beta testing are all parts of the process that can’t be automated with CI.

We think a holistic solution should exist that can pull everything together to provide a true representation of progress towards a successful release that takes into account these parts of (and people involved in) the process.

Hey HN, I’m Isabel, one of the co-founders of Runway. We’re building a SaaS platform that makes it easier to coordinate your team’s iOS and Android releases. Hook up your existing toolchain (e.g. Jira, GitHub, Bitrise, App Store Connect, Slack), and we’ll create a single source of truth for your mobile app release: providing a live timeline of the progress of the release, handling communication of status and blockers, and automating manual steps along the way.

Our team met back in 2013 building Rent the Runway’s iOS app together, and we’ve spent the years since then working on mobile app teams of all sizes. Everywhere we went, getting iOS or Android releases out the door was always an "event". Someone would be stuck spending hours with multiple Chrome tabs open checking on the status of different tools, killing time while waiting for builds to upload, Slacking the owners of various tasks (or worse, @here’ing in a shared channel and hoping for a response), and referring back to a massive Google spreadsheet with the team’s specific release process.

While some build-centric tasks can be automated (e.g. using fastlane or scripts), we see that a lot of the overhead of releases is actually very people-centric: keeping your PM up to date on progress, looping in marketing for release notes, or syncing with QA on the status of regression testing. We also noticed that, even with a solid CI pipeline in place (which itself requires vigilance and maintenance!), there are still lots of manual tasks along the way - build selection, branching and tagging, compiling changelogs, etc.

Runway connects all those dots — it’s the tool we wish we had on our old app teams. It pulls in all Jira tickets and code relevant to the release, side-by-side, to surface and resolve any out-of-sync tickets or code. You can set up custom, interactive checklists with item-specific owners to replace the monster Google spreadsheet, and our Slack integration will ping the appropriate people or notify everyone when important milestones happen. Design/marketing can enter ‘What’s New’ release notes directly in Runway for all localizations (with a handy list of new features in the release to reference) without you having to hunt them down. Plus, Runway helps teams maintain good workflow hygiene by automatically tagging releases in GitHub and applying missing labels to Jira tickets. We’re working on further automation to make releases as hands-off as possible: from kickoff, to submit, to release.

We’re excited to talk to more teams and the HN community at large about their unique release process challenges (and general thoughts as well!)