How Expo streamlined Hipcamp’s native and over-the-air update processes

This is a guest post from Armaiz Adenwala and Tom Podlipni - both are software engineers at Hipcamp. Armaiz is responsible for the mobile app experience and Tom owns CI/CD and dev tooling for the whole eng team.

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For years, Hipcamp relied on App Center for builds and releases. When Microsoft announced its sunset, we needed a replacement that could handle native builds and over-the-air (OTA) updates. Our requirements were simple:

• Fast, reliable native builds for iOS and Android
• Seamless OTA update capabilities
• Simple integration with our existing workflows

After evaluating various options, we chose Expo and its cloud services. It not only met all our requirements but also opened up opportunities to streamline our entire release process.

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One of our biggest wins was build speed. App Center builds took around 60 minutes and frequently timed out for iOS, making them unreliable. Expo's Build service delivers consistent 10-minute builds, a 6x improvement that significantly accelerated our development cycle.

To make builds even easier for our team, we created a custom yarn command that handles the triggering of the Expo's Build workflow. The script prompts for:

• Environment (staging, production, etc.)
• Build type (QA vs. release candidate)
• A human-readable message describing the build

After pre-checks pass, the workflow builds iOS and Android, submits iOS to TestFlight, and sends success notifications.

Unlike other build alternatives like Github Actions, this workflow was extremely simple to create. With Expo's services being mobile-focused, our runners are always optimized for our current SDK along with most of the build complexities being abstracted away.

 # .eas/workflows/builds.yml
  build_android:
    name: Build Android
    type: build
    params:
      platform: android

  build_ios:
    name: Build iOS
    type: build
    params:
      platform: ios

  submit_ios_build:
    name: Submit iOS Build
    needs: [build_ios]
    type: submit

  send_notification:
    name: Send Build Notification
    needs: [build_android, build_ios, submit_ios_build]
    steps:
      - name: Send Slack message
        run: |
          curl -X POST -H "Content-type: application/json" \
          --data '{...}'
          # Slack Webhook Call

When a build completes, we automatically post a notification to our Slack channel with all of the information anyone needs in order to test:

• TestFlight build number (iOS)
• Direct APK download link (Android)
• Pre-filtered Sentry error monitoring link for that specific build
• Slack + Asana integration to automatically create a bug ticket for the build using the ticket reaction

This workflow transformed our process. Anyone in the organization can review and provide feedback on builds without engineering support, while specific teams maintain a feed of pending features for QA and approval.

OTA updates have become a cornerstone of our mobile development workflow. App store reviews can take days, but with over-the-air updates, we can deliver fixes and new features instantly, much like how our team ships web to production.

In the past, we used AppCenter’s CodePush sparingly, since it was too unreliable to depend on for day-to-day releases. Expo’s OTA Update service changed that. It’s stable, predictable, and easy to trust. This means we can ship more often, respond faster to feedback, and keep improving the app without waiting on store approvals.

We maintain a dedicated release branch that represents the current production state:

1. Cut a new release branch for each native release
2. After merging changes to our main branch, our CI/CD pipeline automatically determines if they can be OTA'd
3. Eligible changes are cherry-picked to the release branch and deployed via Expo Updates

OTA eligibility detection

We use expo-fingerprint to automatically detect OTA-compatible changes. This tool performs a deep analysis of native dependencies and generates a unique fingerprint. If a cherry-picked commit has the same fingerprint as the release branch, it means there are no native changes and we can safely OTA the update.

This automation has been critical: it eliminates manual checks and potential human error in determining OTA eligibility.

OTA process overview

Once the pipeline approves an OTA update, our custom script:

1. Triggers the OTA to Expo
2. Uploads Sentry sourcemaps and creates a new release using the update ID
   1. Additionally, the mobile app automatically configures sentry to point to the latest Expo Update ID
3. Updates our Github releases and tags with direct links to the Expo Update dashboard and Sentry issues for this release

This workflow has transformed how we ship mobile features:

• Fewer native releases: We significantly reduced the number of app store submissions
• Web-like deployment cadence: Mobile releases now happen at the same pace as web releases
• Faster incident response: We can quickly identify and roll back broken deployments
• Reduced stress: High-pressure emergency native releases to fix production bugs are now rare

Adopting Expo created ripple effects across our entire team:

• Engineers spend less time debugging build issues and waiting for slow builds to complete.
• Product managers see features deployed to production immediately, enabling faster iteration and feedback loops.
• Designers can review features on their own devices asynchronously, without always needing coordination with engineering.
• On-call engineers can address production bugs quickly without the stress of emergency app store releases.

Expo's combination of reliability, speed, and flexibility made it the clear choice for Hipcamp. EAS Builds cut our build times drastically while Expo Updates enabled web-like deployment velocity for our mobile apps.

If you're considering Expo for your React Native project, we can confidently say: we made the right choice.

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