Launch HN: Runway (YC W21) – Easier iOS and Android app releases for teams
Hi HN! I’m Gabriel, one of the co-founders of Runway (https://runway.team). We’re building a SaaS platform that makes it easier to coordinate your team’s mobile app releases. Runway is an integration layer that sits on top of mobile app teams’ existing project management and development tools, making it possible to understand at-a-glance the status and progress of release cycles and to communicate tasks and blockers — allowing teams to spend their time on improving their product instead of managing releases and tooling.

When I was an iOS engineer, my team rotated everyone through the release manager role for each release cycle. I remember dreading the weeks I was assigned this role - I’d get stuck spending a few 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for builds to upload, Slacking the owners of various tasks, and referring back to a 40-line spreadsheet that was often out of date. . I also felt out of practice each time it was my turn - it was hard to remember the sequence of stuff that needed doing, and there weren’t any guardrails to guide me through the process again. New additions to the team felt even more lost when it was their first couple of turns in the role!

If anything, the problem has worsened over time as mobile apps became first-class platforms at lots of companies, and tech orgs naturally started to grow those development teams and implement more robust and complex toolchains to support them — but much of the process of coordinating those people and tools in order to release regularly has remained frustratingly ad hoc.

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/CD pipeline in place, there are often still lots of manual tasks along the way - build selection, branching and tagging, compiling changelogs, pinging the right people with status and updates, etc.

We built Runway to connect all those dots. 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.

Typically, tasks like these represent lost time that adds up quickly and silently for teams and release managers, between context-switching, monitoring jobs for completion and waiting to get someone’s attention on Slack (all of which only gets harder as teams become more distributed with remote work). In talking to lots of companies, we’ve also noticed that some larger orgs eventually try to build something like Runway in-house, but at a steep cost of dedicated engineers, time, and recurring maintenance.

Runway is made for any team building and shipping mobile apps – we currently support both iOS and Android, and have built-in support for OTA (over-the-air) deploys as well as SDK releases. And, we’re language and framework agnostic: whether you write in Swift, Objective-C, Kotlin, or Java, or use a framework like React Native, Expo, or Flutter, Runway has you covered. We envision Runway as a better way for most teams to manage the release process — one that can save an average-sized mobile team releasing bi-weekly about $50K a year.

We’re still experimenting with pricing strategy, but for now we’re charging a monthly subscription fee per app – there's a lower tier to access most features, and a higher tier with added features is in the works. Currently the product is in private beta, but we’re actively onboarding new teams of all sizes. If you and your team are interested in trying Runway out, head to https://runway.team/demo for a detailed demo video and we’ll get you onboarded right away!

There are lots of possibilities for further automation and intelligent monitoring on a platform that serves as the glue between the pieces of a release workflow, and we’re excited to hear from the HN community about their unique release process challenges (and general thoughts as well!)