Managing screenshots and metadata for the app stores can be one of the biggest offenders when it comes to wasted time and context-switching during releases. For one, the stores limit when you can actually go update release notes and metadata for an upcoming version, often turning this part of the process into a last minute scramble and a lot of copy-pasting, with engineers needing to track down and loop in product or marketing help and then quickly update everything in the stores. Plus, if your app is localized, you can multiply that scramble by the number of languages you serve, with extra work to send out new metadata for translation and then pull the translations back in before submission (ideally without any languages slipping through the cracks!). Â Â
To help your team avoid the rush to get store release metadata sorted, and even allow you to plan ahead, you can now update release notes and metadata for upcoming releases as early as you like. As soon as a release exists in Runway, you can navigate in and save release notes and metadata, ahead of time. Runway will monitor the status of the release in store and automatically take care of syncing any updates as soon as it’s possible to do so — no manual copy-pasting required!
You can also leverage Runway’s translations integration to get a head start on metadata localization. If you opt in to have your translation integration handle metadata, each metadata field will reflect a status that lets you see at a glance what needs to be uploaded for translation, what’s still in the process of being translated, and what’s translated and ready for export to the app store. Whenever you’re ready, you can trigger an export of all translated metadata, which automatically syncs it to the store directly from your translations provider.
You can also automate this entire process by enabling the new “Sync metadata translations” automation. With the automation enabled, all you have to do is make the desired changes to a release’s metadata for your source language only. Runway will automatically upload everything for translation, watch the status of translations, and export completed translations to the app store as soon as they’re ready.
New app versions aren’t the only things you need to submit for review in App Store Connect. For teams that take advantage of Apple’s in-app events or custom product pages, you’ll know that these items also need to undergo review before they go live. You’ll also know that you can only have one submission in review at a time. While Apple does let you combine new app versions with additional submission items to submit all together, this calls for a lot of extra coordination across the team — and often across disciplines, given folks like marketing are typically involved for in-app events and custom product pages. It can be difficult to make sure everything is ready to go at once, and seeing status and submitting multiple submission items in App Store Connect can be cumbersome and confusing (especially for less technical contributors).  Â
Now, your team can handle in-app events and custom product pages alongside app version submissions in Runway for a clearer and easier way to coordinate across multiple submission items. On the Submission step in your iOS releases in Runway, you can now select one or more in-app events and custom product pages to queue up for submission alongside your app versions. All the different kinds of items that are selected for submission are visualized on the step, and when you’re ready to proceed (whether manually or automatically), Runway takes all of those items and submits them for review together.
Building on our new support for additional submission items, Runway now also gives you an easy way to resolve the frustrating roadblocks that crop up when coordination around multiple submission items breaks down. Odds are you’ve experienced this kind of scenario before. Someone on one side of the org spins up a new in-app event, custom product page or product page optimization and excitedly submits it for review in App Store Connect, unaware that there’s a new app version scheduled for submission shortly thereafter. When their teammates go to submit the new version, they’re met with an error explaining that they can’t proceed because other items are already submitted. A whole back-and-forth ensues to figure out what’s already submitted and what needs to be submitted, then a bunch of clicking around in App Store Connect to remove items and resubmit. Â
Runway’s “unblock submission” action seamlessly resolves this kind of situation with a single click. Alongside full context on all your submission items on the Submission step, when Runway detects a state that is blocking your app submission, we surface a button that allows you to instantly pull all blocking submission items from the queue or from review, then re-add each of those items alongside the build you want to submit so that you can easily proceed by submitting all items together.
IYKYK, and many of you have probably heard us talk about this before: there’s a longstanding issue with the Play Console Publisher API whereby releases transition immediately from a draft status to live, even if they get flagged for review by Google, and even if you have managed publishing enabled and haven’t yet hit the button to release. This creates a pretty difficult blind spot for anyone building tooling on top of the Publisher API, since you can’t know for sure whether a given version is actually live in the Play Store. In Runway, we’ve had to make less-than-ideal accommodations to deal with this, like optimistically considering releases as live immediately after submission, and giving teams a way to manually signal to Runway that we should start an automated staged rollout for them.
Judging from this issue that’s been open with Google for years, they don’t plan on fixing this anytime soon — so we decided to build a workaround. If you simply forward your Google publishing update emails to Runway, we’ll use those to determine when your releases actually go live. Runway uses the broader context we have about your team's release cycles and timing at different stages to match emailed updates to the right releases, and to understand release status accordingly. The first piece of user-facing functionality that builds on top of this is a new Slack notification that goes out as soon as each release is actually live, and we plan to tie more features to this in future.
Making sense of all the work that’s shipping — or expected to ship — with each release can be a daunting task. There are tickets to comb through, commits and PRs to check on, product owners and code owners to track down. Runway’s Feature Readiness view already helps teams by creating a unified view across all these important pieces of the puzzle, but we heard from teams that they wanted more options for slicing and dicing this view to get at exactly the info they need.
We’ve added new functionality to the Feature Readiness view to help everyone on your team get exactly the view they’re looking for. To allow you to quickly find a specific work item in Feature Readiness, we’ve added search. You can drill into fields across both tickets and code, searching within commit messages, PR descriptions, and much more. There are also new filters available on Feature Readiness: for PR label or milestone, for ticket label or fix version, and one that will hide any unsquashed commits, showing only merged PRs or direct commits.
To allow you to build your preferred view on Feature Readiness and then keep it, we added persistence of filters and sort so that you can navigate away and then return exactly where you left off.
If you’re a Runway power user – or perhaps just someone who prefers to move across apps with just their keyboard – Runway’s new Quick Actions Menu allows you to do just that. Quickly switch across apps, releases, or navigate to specific settings for your app by invoking the Quick Action Menu, which surfaces shortcuts to many of the most important pages within Runway. Enter command + K/ctrl + K from anywhere in Runway to invoke the Quick Action Menu and use it to supercharge how you navigate across pages.
One of the powerful ways in which Runway provides greater visibility into the release process across the entire team is with its rich and detailed timeline for each and every release, with timeline events broken out into (and accessible from) the most relevant release step within which they occurred. Timeline events can be an invaluable resource in many scenarios, like for example, during a post-mortem if you’re looking to track down specific actions involved or understand a sequence of events. And now it’s even easier to leverage Runway’s release timeline to zoom into specific events with search, which is now available on the timeline across all the places it appears.
Runway’s ability to handle artifacts produced as part of build runs is just a subset of the broader functionality that comes with our CI integrations. But it’s an important one for certain artifact automations on the mobile release management side (artifact upload, attachment to releases in version control, etc.), and an especially important one for Build Distro. We’ve expanded our support for artifact handling to cover many more of the CI integrations we already offer. Azure Pipelines, Jenkins, Xcode Cloud, and Buildkite are the latest integrations that are now supported for Build Distro and artifact automations.
