Show HN: Runway – Release apps with less bouncing between Jira/GH/CI/Apple/Slack

Hey HN, I’m Gabriel from the Runway team. We’re building a SaaS platform that makes it easier to coordinate your team’s iOS and Android releases. Hook up your existing toolchain (e.g. Jira, GitHub, Bitrise, App Store Connect, Slack), and we’ll create a single source of truth for your mobile app release: providing a live timeline of the progress of the release, handling communication of status and blockers, and automating manual steps along the way.

Our team met back in 2013 building Rent the Runway’s iOS app together, and we’ve spent the years since then working on mobile app teams of all sizes. Everywhere we went, getting iOS or Android releases out the door was always an "event". Someone would be stuck spending hours with multiple Chrome tabs open checking on the status of different tools, killing time while waiting for builds to upload, Slacking the owners of various tasks, and referring back to a 40-line Google spreadsheet with the team’s specific release process. With all the context-switching and mental overhead, it made it hard to get anything else done.

While some build-centric tasks can be automated (e.g. using fastlane or scripts), we see that a lot of the overhead of releases is actually very people-centric: keeping your PM up to date on progress, looping in marketing for release notes, or syncing with QA on the status of regression testing. We also noticed that, even with a solid CI pipeline in place, there are still lots of manual tasks along the way - build selection, branching and tagging, compiling changelogs, etc.

Runway connects all those dots — it’s the tool we wish we had on our old app teams. It pulls in all Jira tickets and code relevant to the release, side-by-side, to surface and resolve any out-of-sync tickets or code. You can set up custom, interactive checklists with item-specific owners to replace the monster Google spreadsheet, and our Slack integration will ping the appropriate people or notify everyone when important milestones happen. Design/marketing can enter ‘What’s New’ release notes directly in Runway for all localizations (with a handy list of new features in the release to reference) without you having to hunt them down. Plus, Runway helps teams maintain good workflow hygiene by automatically tagging releases in GitHub and applying missing labels to Jira tickets. We’re working on further automation to make releases as hands-off as possible: from kickoff, to submit, to release.

We’re excited to talk to more teams and the HN community at large about their unique release process challenges (and general thoughts as well!)

This looks really awesome. Great work! Question: Do you support Bitrise integration? Thanks! :)

Hey, cool stuff! Can I use this if I don’t have CI set up?

Runway definitely works without CI integrated! But, lack of build data does limit some of the cool stuff Runway can otherwise do - e.g. automatically tagging releases, and soon easier/auto build selection in ASC/Play. The CI piece definitely makes a difference, so we're exploring the possibility of offering simple out-of-the-box to teams without!

It seems like it's going to be tricky to balance between flexibility to support all kinds of workflows and streamlined experience by standardizing workflows. Where does Runway stand in terms of this tradeoff?