Show HN: Runway – Release apps with less bouncing between Jira/GH/CI/Apple/Slack | Hacker News Reader

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runway.team

44 pointsgsavit22 comments

Hey HN, I’m Gabriel from the Runway team. 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, and referring back to a 40-line Google spreadsheet with the team’s specific release process. With all the context-switching and mental overhead, it made it hard to get anything else done.

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, 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!)

It seems like it's going to be tricky to balance between flexibility to support all kinds of workflows and streamlined experience by standardizing workflows. Where does Runway stand in terms of this tradeoff?

The short answer is that we're working hard to make Runway as adaptable as possible to the varied needs that we've heard about from our partner teams.

But in general - it is tricky, and I think the perfect balance changes depending on what type of a team we're talking about. We've talked to small teams, larger ones with more complex structures (like multiple product teams all contributing code to a single binary), but also teams who are fairly agnostic about their branching and tooling setup, and those who are more opinionated.

There is certainly a version of Runway that could be much more prescriptive (and limited) for teams who prefer more guidance in setting up a release toolchain. For now, we're trying to hit a sweet spot of enough flexibility to meet the needs of most teams, while encouraging best practice in a few areas that we think will streamline everyone's process.

It's an ongoing conversation and it's really helpful to hear from individual teams on how Runway could help in their specific situation.

The value add of workflow management and coordination beyond build-centric task automation makes sense. Excited for what it sounds like you guys have up your sleeves on the web development side also.

I'm curious how the product can effectively support unique/customized workflows across different teams? How do you guys think about that?

Yep, we realized early on that this is a challenge. Does Runway try to be more of a plug-and-play solution for teams that need to get a basic release pipeline spun up quickly, or does it focus more on flexibility for more established teams with stronger opinions and preferences on the individual parts of their toolchain configuration?

So far we've tried to hit a balance between the two, informed as much as possible by our pilot teams and our gauge on what will most effectively serve the most teams to start. Will definitely be an ongoing conversation.

YES, reduce the pain of releases for teams, all makes sense but how does this work for a one wo/man show, if at all?

We think Runway will still add value for a solo developer, but it's definitely a bit more optimized for teams at the moment.

Notably, coordinating communication and understanding the status of the work between multiple team members wouldn't come into play, but there would still be value in seeing the status of individual steps and tools consolidated together, as well as reconciling code + tickets, and understanding overall progress towards a release.

A version of Runway that is more explicitly geared towards solo developers is certainly something we've thought about and may dig into further!

Would have loved this when working on our mobile release process previously, was always such a pain.

I always had trouble getting notified when a release was blocked from App Store review since it required getting an email and then logging into App Store Connect to find the reason for rejection. Does Runway help surface rejection reasons into other tools?

Part of what we’re trying to do with Runway is to consolidate all the various sources of information about your release.

We do currently notify your team in Slack of any changes to your review status in App Store Connect. Providing further detail about your rejection reason is 100% something that’s on our roadmap for the “App Review” step, along with making it clear who owns the task of responding to rejections if needed.

This looks interesting. We do not have mobile apps today, so probably not the target audience, but we find coordinating releases for our web app across business & product teams a real pain. Are there other tools out there that solve that problem for web?

This sounds very promising! I used to create checklists in Confluence and that was pretty hard to manage.

One question - does this only work for public releases or will it also help me with internal distribution (e.g. ad hoc/testflight for iOS)?

Right now the focus is on public/prod deployment. Beta Testing is a step within Runway, but it's not so fleshed out and no integrations are pulled in there yet. It's definitely on our roadmap though - we want to help teams codify and streamline their internal distribution!

Looks promising,but good luck keeping up with the appstores' unannounced changes. Btw what kind of metrics would be available for users?

We're aiming to offer release-based metrics that are hard to find elsewhere. Things like the time it took for a given release cycle, frequency, finding and displaying common release bottlenecks, and volume of blockers during testing and over time are a couple examples of the types of data Runway could be uniquely positioned to provide.

YES :D we so need this for our team! Question, though... how is this different from Fastlane?

This looks really awesome. Great work! Question: Do you support Bitrise integration? Thanks! :)

Thanks for the kind words!

We do support Bitrise! And CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins. We're adding more integrations regularly, and we prioritize as we hear from teams with specific needs.

Looks great! Any plans to support workflows other than for app development?

We've heard from teams working on non-mobile platforms that they share a lot of these pain points.

There's also the reality that coordinating app releases often includes wrangling dependencies on backend services.

All of the above is definitely on our radar… stay tuned!

Hey, cool stuff! Can I use this if I don’t have CI set up?

Runway definitely works without CI integrated! But, lack of build data does limit some of the cool stuff Runway can otherwise do - e.g. automatically tagging releases, and soon easier/auto build selection in ASC/Play. The CI piece definitely makes a difference, so we're exploring the possibility of offering simple out-of-the-box to teams without!

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