OTA updates have become a cornerstone of our mobile development workflow.

For years, Hipcamp relied on App Center for builds and releases. When Microsoft announced its sunset, they needed a replacement that could handle native builds and over-the-air (OTA) updates. After evaluating various options, they chose Expo and its cloud services. It not only met all their requirements but also opened up opportunities to streamline their entire release process.

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

To make builds even easier, the team created a custom command that handles triggering the EAS Build workflow. The script prompts for environment, build type, and 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.

When a build completes, a notification is automatically posted to Slack with everything anyone needs to test:

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

This workflow transformed the process. Anyone in the organization can review and provide feedback on builds without engineering support.

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

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

The team maintains a dedicated release branch that represents the current production state. After merging changes to the main branch, the CI/CD pipeline automatically determines if they can be OTA'd.

They use expo-fingerprint to detect OTA-compatible changes automatically. If a cherry-picked commit has the same fingerprint as the release branch, it means there are no native changes and the update can safely be shipped over-the-air. This automation eliminates manual checks and potential human error in determining OTA eligibility.

This workflow has transformed how Hipcamp ships mobile features:

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

Adopting Expo created ripple effects across the entire organization:

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

EAS Build cut build times drastically while Expo Updates enabled web-like deployment velocity for mobile apps. Hipcamp made the right choice.