If you’re part of an iOS team, chances are you’ve had to deal with the massive headache that is wrangling device registration and managing provisioning profiles. Or, maybe you have some heroes on your platform team who spend way too much of their time dealing with all of this busywork for you and the rest of your team. Whatever the case, you can now hand off all this hassle to Runway: we’ll keep your team’s devices updated in the Apple Developer portal as folks come and go, and automatically generate and re-generate relevant provisioning profiles along the way.
It all starts with a seamless flow that makes it dead simple to collect new device identifiers from your team – no more fumbling around for those long IDs that no one knows how to find. With just a couple of taps, you can install a web clip on new devices to automatically collect the device identifier and send it over to Runway (plus, if you’re using Build Distro, the web clip also gives the device instant access to your team’s build buckets).
Runway will automatically register new devices in the Apple Developer portal and disable devices when folks leave your team, freeing you from needing to stay on top of that constant cleanup. Each and every time your list of registered devices changes, Runway takes care of updating the necessary provisioning profiles to ensure new builds are installable by all the right team members.
When you identify a critical issue in production and need to get a hotfix going, time is of the essence. At the same time, the rush to get a fix in and out the door often leads to silly mistakes. So, we’ve added a new automation to Runway’s hotfix flow to both speed things up and make things less error-prone. In addition to existing options to automatically cut a branch from your last release tag and immediately bump version on that branch, you can now also select all the necessary fixes from your development branch, and Runway will cherry-pick them over into the hotfix – all in a single step.
Slack user groups are a good way to get the right comms in front of the right teams and roles within your org, but they take work to manage and keep up to date. Now, Runway can take that work off your plate. When you enable Runway’s new ‘Sync Slack groups’ automation, you’ll specify a mapping of roles (e.g. engineers, PMs, QA, etc.) to the Slack user groups you might already use – or want to use – for those different folks on your team, and we’ll take it from there. First, Runway auto-creates any Slack groups that don’t yet exist, then continuously ensures all groups are kept up to date by automatically adding or removing users for each as folks join, change roles, or leave your team.
Once you have your roles-to-groups mapping defined, and even if you choose not to enable the syncing automation, Runway can use the mapping to @mention the appropriate groups whenever needed – for example, if you have assigned a checklist or approval item to a specific role, or if you add a role to a specific Runway notification.
Every team has that post-release ritual where someone has to open up a bunch of browser tabs and chase other folks down for various pieces of release context, then copy-paste it all together and get that summary in front of a wider audience within the org. Of course, the Runway platform itself is one good substitute for this tedious exercise, giving everyone self-serve access to the complete picture release to release. But Runway now also helps you easily distribute release info outside the platform, to the constellation of interested folks who aren’t as close to the process or to mobile in general, by automatically generating release summaries and optionally sending those out via email after each release. You can customize these release summaries to suit your team’s needs, with a range of dynamic tokens that Runway will populate based on actual data from the release.
Oftentimes teams need to get artifacts to multiple different places as they advance through different stages of internal distribution. For example, you might start distributing feature builds through Build Distro, then advance to a wider audience via TestFlight or Play Console testing tracks. To help with this process, we’ve taken the artifact upload automation that already existed on the release management side and brought it over to Build Distro as well. You can enable the upload automation on a per-bucket basis and configure the specific destination where artifacts are sent onwards to. Automatic retries safeguard against intermittent errors during this often-flaky part of the process.
Runway’s existing trigger workflow automation makes it easy to generate new builds as needed, whenever there are new changes to build, based on a given Build Distro bucket’s rules. But there are certain flavors of builds, typically those off of busy shared branches, which need a more measured approach. Think nightlies or other shared builds off of your team’s main development branch. A new option on the automatic trigger bucket automation allows you to change its behavior so that it runs on some recurring cadence you define – hourly, daily, every N hours – instead of on every diff.
Building on our functionality that lets you render certain release steps as non-blocking in the context of your overall release workflow in Runway, we’ve added more ways to further customize release steps. First, for non-blocking steps, you can now choose to hide those steps completely from release timelines if they’re not at all relevant for your team. And, you can configure non-blocking steps per release type, allowing you to adjust your team’s workflow for normal releases vs hotfixes.
Many teams have already streamlined and shored-up their pipelines by handing the build upload step over to Runway: we take care of grabbing the right artifacts and ensuring they get uploaded, with automatic retries if needed. But on the Android side, with the way Play Console works, that just lands builds into “general storage”, with teams needing to move builds onwards to an initial track from there. Certain existing Runway automations help with track promotion later in the release cycle, but we can now also help with initial track release creation. A new option on Runway’s build upload automation lets you specify a default initial track for uploads, so we’ll make sure new builds make their way out of storage and onto that track.
