Product Updates

App Home

‍We built App Home as a quick overview of the most important releases for your app. 

• Live release: At the top, you’ll see a summary of the release that’s currently live on the app store. Some details here include the date it was released, how long your release cycle took, and your current App Store rating.

• Next release: Here, you’ll see how close you are to being feature complete, a timeline of important events that have happened so far for that release, and key dates.

• Upcoming release: These are releases that are planned for the future, and will show the release description, the pilot slated for the release and key dates like the target kickoff.

Working branch Feature Readiness‍

We’ve heard that sometimes it’s useful to track progress towards a release before it’s actually been kicked off. So, we’ve added the ability to switch your base branch in feature readiness, so you can view progress towards the release relative to your main development branch. Just be sure to set a working branch in your App Settings if you haven’t already.

Ignore button on Feature Readiness

‍Sometimes you don’t want a piece of work to be counted towards the release, but still want to get to feature complete on Runway. We added the option to ignore an item of work so it won’t be considered in determining Feature Readiness. You can always bring back that item by clicking “Include”.

Revamped ‘Kickoff’

‍We recognize that planning for future releases is a key part of a good release process. That’s why we’ve reimagined the ‘Kickoff’ step to surface more of the important details of an upcoming release, and to give your team more flexibility to make changes as needed.

Check out some of the new features we’ve added to the Kickoff step:

Scheduling: Now, you can easily see target kickoff and release dates for a given version. If you set target dates, Runway will send your team a Slack notification before key dates as a reminder.

Edit release settings: You can also modify the details of your release, like release type (major, minor, point), release pilot, and target dates.

Release description: Add some notes or information to help you plan your release.

Create release branch: If your team uses release branches, you can now create the release branch directly from the Kickoff step. Soon, Runway will be able to automatically cut your release branch on the target kickoff date.

If you’re looking for checklist items, they have a new home up on the top right of each step:

🎉Android 

Our long-awaited launch of support for Android is finally here, bringing together release coordination across platforms. Here’s what that means:

• You can now coordinate releases for both Android and iOS apps within Runway
• We’ve added a Google Play integration which uses Google’s Play Developer API under the hood
• All of Runway’s existing features are now supported for Android apps

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Send us a note via Slack or email to schedule a time to get your team set up.

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Release notes and ‘What’s New’

‍We’ve heard time and time again that keeping release notes in a spreadsheet and copying and pasting them into App Store Connect or Google Play is a headache. We’ve built a real home for release notes in Runway, where your PM or copywriter can come to add release notes and upload them to the relevant app store, for all localizations.

Oh and of course, it works for updating Release Notes on the Play Console as well!

We also added a helpful “Feature list” button on the Metadata screen, which pulls up all the tickets that are part of the release. We think it could come in handy as inspiration when drafting release notes.

Redesigned releases timeline

‍We’re spending time improving how releases are displayed in the timeline. You’ll now see releases separated into “Upcoming”, “Active” and “Completed” buckets, helping call attention to your imminent release. 

Release-type-specific checklist items

‍Create checklist items that only appear for specific release types. When creating or editing a checklist item, select the release types that you’d like the checklist item to apply to. It will only show up on releases of that type.

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Takeoff step

Runway now shows you the connection between your selected App Store Connect build, and the corresponding RC build on CI. If the build selected on App Store Connect is older than the most recent CI build, we’ll show a helpful message to call that out. Mostly likely, you’ll want to make sure the most recent CI build is also the build selected on App Store Connect.

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Plus a few more little things:

• If you’ve opted into a phased release, we now display the status of your phased release rollout, including what day of the rollout you’re currently on
• If you’ve opted into a scheduled release, we now display your scheduled release date
• Improved messaging on the App Store Connect status of your submitted build
  

And in case you missed it, we launched Slack notifications and automatic tagging over the holidays. For Slack notifications, make sure to connect the Runway Slack app to your workspace from the integrations screen on Runway. To enable automatic tagging, a GitHub repo admin must accept the updated GitHub permissions, and then you should be all set!