Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Self-hosting OTA updates became common after App Center and CodePush shut down in 2025. CodePush had been the popular free option, but the remaining hosted services easily hitting five or six figure bills for popular apps. For staging-only or use with small user bases, self-hosting is fairly straight forwards. But, as the user base grows, the architecture can start to struggle and bolt on pieces are required.

React Native debugging poses particular challenges due to the framework’s cross-platform codebase, which combines JavaScript and native platform components. However, an effective React debugging regime will enable you to proactively fix issues in both production and development. Today’s post will give you the fundamentals to build that regime, showing you: Want to jump to a specific bit of knowledge? Here’s the full list of contents.

A React Native build is really two builds stacked on top of each other. On Android, Gradle compiles your Kotlin and Java, then drops down into cmake and ndk-build to compile the C++ that ships inside Hermes, Folly, ReactCommon, and your own turbo modules. On iOS, Xcode does the equivalent: Swift and Objective-C on top, the same C++ underneath via Clang. Two build systems, two languages on top, one shared set of C++ underneath.

Having maintained a CodePush fork for 18 months and served billions of updates, we decided it was time for an overhaul. We’re big fans of CodePush, and it was a great benefit to the React Native community. But, it was written in 2015 and had some weaknesses. The biggest of these was architectural, with limitations in how update checks and release metadata could scale. The result, Codemagic Patch, is now public and available to self-host.

The React Native New Architecture is no longer optional. From React Native 0.82 onwards it is mandatory, the legacy architecture is gone, and every team still running it is now carrying technical debt that will need to be resolved. For most teams, the migration conversation quickly turns to tooling. Does our CI/CD pipeline still work? Does our crash reporter still integrate correctly? Do our analytics tools need updating?

The ability to push an update directly to your users’ devices without App Store review, without delay, without any action required from the user, is one of the most powerful capabilities available to a React Native team. Over-the-air (OTA) updates change how fast you can respond to bugs, iterate on features, and ship improvements. But that power cuts both ways. A bad OTA update reaching 100% of your users at once is considerably worse than a bad store release.

The Next.js vs React question is not really a comparison between two competing tools — Next.js is built on top of React. React itself is a UI rendering JavaScript library used for building user interfaces across platforms, including web applications and mobile apps with React Native, while Next.js is a framework that wraps React and makes concrete decisions about routing, data fetching, and server-side concerns.

Retail banking is quietly undergoing one of its biggest shifts in decades. Customers no longer compare banks to other banks. They compare them to Netflix, Amazon, and every digital experience that already gets them. That expectation has changed the game. This is where AI-powered personalization in retail banking comes in. Instead of offering generic products to broad customer segments, banks can now deliver hyper-relevant experiences in real time.