📲 ⏪ Mobile Rollbacks by Runway

Mobile Rollbacks ensure your team is always just one click away from addressing critical bugs in production.

No one is immune from shipping critical bugs to production. No matter how extensive your test coverage, no matter how thorough your QA, no matter how much you put behind feature flags — your mobile team will ship irreversibly-bad updates that break things and upset your users.

This is especially problematic for mobile because you can’t roll back immediately like your web or backend friends can. Rather, you have to triage the issue and assign it to the right team members, implement fixes (or carefully revert the offending changes), compile one or more RCs, upload to the stores, submit for review, then cross your fingers and pray to the store review gods for a speedy review. And the negative impacts of even just a few hours with a critically broken app can be eye-watering: tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, a flood of negative user reviews, and overwhelmed CX or ops folks.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if you could instantly resolve a critical issue in prod, with a single click? Now, you can.

Recover from production issues in zero time — literally

Critical issue? Roll back instantly. In the background of every normal release cycle, Runway automatically re-signs your last live production build and preps it for a possible rollback release — including preemptive submission for review (iOS only) — to remove all possible sources of delay. Should something go wrong in prod, there’s always a corresponding rollback build ready and waiting for single-click release in Runway.

Here’s how the rollback flow works in a bit more detail:

1. Your team is busy getting your next regularly-scheduled release out the door. Let’s call it version 1.2.0.
2. In the background, Runway takes your latest live build in production — say, 1.1.0 — and re-signs it, bumping the version to 1.2.1 and incrementing the build number as necessary.
3. Your team releases 1.2.0 as scheduled. Nice!
4. The 1.2.1 rollback release is surfaced in Runway, just in case. For iOS, we also preemptively create a new version for the possible rollback in App Store Connect and submit the rollback build for review.
5. Your team is monitoring the rollout of 1.2.0 and identifies a critical issue 🚨You halt the rollout.
6. Right next to the button you used to halt the rollout, there’s another button to release the rollback build that’s ready and waiting. Click that, and you’re all set.

With rollback builds primed and ready to go, your team can address critical bugs in prod with a single click — cutting out all the lead time needed to investigate and implement a fix, get builds compiled and uploaded, and make it through the store review process.

Take the pressure out of hotfixes; triage more fully and fix more confidently

Even if you ship a rollback to address an issue in prod, it doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily wait until your next regularly-scheduled release to issue a fix. In fact, it’s likely you’ll use rollbacks in conjunction with roll-forward hotfixes — and those hotfixes will be better as a result. Because rollbacks allow you to instantly stabilize a critical situation, you can take your time in triaging, investigating, implementing fixes, and then working through your hotfix release process.

More predictable resolution timelines & fewer unanswerable questions from stakeholders

Every team knows the feeling of dread that hits when you’ve shipped a breaking change and leadership shows up in your #mobile Slack channel. Is the fix in yet? Is the build approved by Apple? How about now? With rollbacks in Runway, you can actually respond to these kinds of asks, and give stakeholders confidence that the situation is under control.

When you need a rollback, it’s there for you (batteries included). When you don’t, we’ll handle all the cleanup.

Runway’s rollbacks functionality encompasses quite a few dependencies and steps which, if approximated manually each and every release, would require a lot of work — not just to prepare each rollback, but also to clean up unused rollbacks along the way. Now, you no longer have to choose between investing huge amounts of time and effort into setting up rollbacks manually or else forfeiting the safety net rollbacks provide.

With rollbacks, Runway gives your mobile team the quickest possible way to respond to critical issues in production. Instead of scrambling to identify, implement, and ship a fix, you can immediately “stem the bleeding” and resolve things with a single click. Stakeholders won’t hover wondering when a resolution will land, and your team can triage and implement fixes more confidently, without all the pressure that typically accompanies hotfix situations. Plus, rollbacks mitigate the serious negative impact to revenue and app store reviews that comes with a buggy app being in users’ hands for even just a couple of hours.

How to give Rollbacks a try

You can sign up for free on the Runway site, no credit card required, and we’re always available to give you a guided walkthrough — just get in touch!