App store reviews can provide an unexpectedly valuable window into your app’s health, highlighting issues that might not otherwise surface in crash reports, observability data, or product analytics. But it’s difficult to actually leverage reviews as part of your team’s overall health monitoring strategy. If you have a lot of users there are simply too many reviews to sift through, and no matter how many users you have there’s still lots of noise that has nothing to do with the app’s functionality – “Terrible customer service”, “My order was late”, etc.
Now, Runway can help you separate signal from noise so you can make the most of user reviews as an additional indicator of app health. We use AI to analyze all of your incoming app store reviews and identify common issues mentioned in them, surfacing these issues (alongside specific examples pulled directly from the reviews) on each release’s Rollout page. Simply evaluating for sentiment isn’t enough, since that would include reviews which have nothing to do with the app, so Runway considers the context of your company and app in order to single out bugs and broken functionality.
Sticking with the store reviews theme, there’s a new automation in Runway that will automatically translate any non-English reviews and surface those translations alongside the original reviews in Slack (if you have store review notifications enabled). Avoid the multiple tabs and back and forth with translation tools when you need to figure out what users are saying about your app!
Until now, you’ve used the “roles” functionality to scope access and group users in Runway. But because roles can be used in so many different ways in the platform — not just for RBAC and organization purposes, but also for things like notification pings, checklist item ownership, and syncing users between integrations — teams have been telling us they want to be able to create and manage their own roles. Now, you can do exactly that.
Runway’s roles functionality has expanded into what is now called “groups”. You can create as many custom groups as you like, assigning subsets of users and a list of permissions to each, and you can use these groups to segment users by role, team, or any other functional grouping within your org. As before, you can do things like: assign groups as owners on checklist items, regression testing items, and approval items; set up mapping to your Slack user groups so that folks are pinged in certain notifications from Runway; configure directory sync to automatically bridge from teams and groups in your company’s internal directory to groups in Runway; add groups as members on Build Distro buckets; and more.
As our team often likes to say, your job isn’t done when you hit the button to release — or when Runway releases for you automatically! Running rollouts is a critical part of the overall mobile release cycle, and there’s already a lot you can do in Runway to automate and safeguard this part of the process. Now, we’ve released a couple of new additions to give you even more control as you roll out.
First, we brought Runway’s checklist items functionality to the Rollout page so you can assign and track any post-release tasks the team needs to perform. Like checklist items elsewhere, you can set up automatic reminders and interact with them via our API and webhooks for extensibility.
Building on top of that, you can now also gate Runway’s rollout acceleration automation based on one or more checklist items. Runway will monitor your rollout and configured health metrics as usual, but even if health and adoption conditions are met, Runway won’t trigger the acceleration to 100% unless all required checklist items are also complete. This gives your team a powerful way to combine automation with human inputs that bring additional context, influencing whether you want to accelerate a rollout or not. Notifications can also be sent if conditions are met but checklist items are still incomplete.
The Feature Readiness view in Runway is designed to give your team a crystal clear picture of everything you’re shipping, as well as any pending work that’s expected to ship with a given release. Being able to visualize incomplete items and potential blockers is helpful in and of itself, but you often need to take that info and then go track down the people or teams responsible.
To help you quickly follow up on outstanding items and make sure your releases stay on schedule, we’ve added a “Ping all pending owners” action to the Feature Readiness step. When you click the button to ping, Runway will send a notification into Slack tagging the respective owners of the code and/or project management tickets associated with the pending work.
Many Android teams need to include older builds alongside new ones in each release they ship, to maintain support for certain form factors or other segments of their audience. Previously, in order to do that, teams would have to remember to manually select the older builds to retain on the submission step in Runway for each and every release. Now, you can select any builds to be retained just once and Runway will automatically include those builds alongside your new builds each time you submit and release (or until you clear the retained builds in Runway).
There are two new additions to Runway’s integrations, in two different domains. Huawei AppGallery is our latest app store integration, giving you yet another destination to ship your Android builds to (with even more destinations on the way - see below!). And at Runway’s translations integration point, you can now hook up Lokalise to better visualize the state of localizable strings for each release, and sync changes across your codebase, Lokalise, and even the app stores for localized metadata.
In designing Build Distro’s bucketing structure, our goal was to help teams take the laundry list of different builds they distribute and break it down into logical groupings based on audience and build flavor. But even with clearer groupings, team members often need to grab builds from various buckets and it can still be hard to find the exact build you’re looking for at any given time.
To help users get to the right build in seconds, we added global search to Build Distro. You can search by build number or against other fields like commit message or PR title.
Runway’s out-of-the-box integrations with a range of different CI providers give teams a quick and easy way to spin up Build Distro buckets and automatically ensure the right builds get distributed to the right places. But there are plenty of reasons why a team might want lower-level access to manage builds and buckets directly, and we’ve been prioritizing work to expand Build Distro’s footprint in our public API. Our latest additions include endpoints that allow you to upload builds and create, read, and update buckets.
Details – and a sneak peek at more endpoints that are on their way shortly – are available in our API documentation.
