If you’re like me and a lot of other developers I worked with in recent years, chances are you don’t like to wait minutes or hours for app or compiler builds. Sadly this is an every day reality for many major companies developing native Android and iOS apps. It’s especially frustrating for React Native apps, where 90% of changes happen on JS land which has all the benefits of Fast Refresh available in Metro or Re.Pack bundlers.
We’ve seen teams where collective monthly time spend on waiting for builds is 7% of the whole team availability.
What if we didn’t have to wait for builds ever again? Or almost never.
I’d like to share a sneak peek of what we’ve been working on recently with@mdjastrzebski and@szymonrybczak. It’s a preview of a setup for any CI of your choosing—currently working with GitHub Actions—that integrates with a new CLI for interacting with React Native apps. We only build in the cloud. Once the build is there, the run:android (and soon run:ios) command can fetch that build for you and push it directly to a device. This app will connect to your Metro or Re.Pack dev server and update the JavaScript that’s available on your branch.
This is still early experiment, but we’re super excited about the opportunities it opens. Imagine never having to run “pod install” or “gradlew” again. Imagine not having to teach web React engineers about that. And all of that using your cloud.
Follow us for more updates in 2025!
