You are officially entering the code freeze zone. It might be today. It might be tomorrow. It might be the beginning of next week because Product and Marketing are pushing you to finish shipping a list of small “delighter” features so they can tell customers about them in an “Our Gift to You!” email and give your revenue numbers one last boost before end of year. Whatever the exact date may be, you’ll soon be closing your laptop to ensure no last-minute bugs wreck anyone’s holiday parties.

There’s one place we never close our laptops: The Flight Deck. At least partially because we watch all our podcasts on YouTube now. In this edition, we cover the process inefficiencies that affect developer satisfaction the most, how mobile releases break the rules, the fun of building AI agents in Kotlin, and more.

Posts we liked

Accelerating mobile releases at Faire with 80% faster deployment lead times

Faire didn’t just speed up their releases by 80%; they also got new features into users’ hands 1.5 times faster. Zachary Radford details how his team took a step back to recognize that their mobile release status quo didn’t actually have to be their status quo, found bottlenecks in both their tools and company culture, made changes to their process and platform, and then measured the results to keep improving.

What process inefficiencies have the biggest impact on developer satisfaction

In a perfect world, every single software developer could sit down at their computer, write some useful code, and then ship that code out to customers as soon as it’s ready (and tested) with nothing to distract or slow them down in the interim. But our world is imperfect, which means gunked-up workflows and process inefficiencies can turn software development into a series of meetings about coding instead of actual coding. Lizzie Matusov digs into what makes developers the unhappiest (and it’s not just meetings).

Why your CTO might start coding again

As terrifying as that may sound to anyone who has ever seen the tech debt founders leave behind while building a startup (sorry, Runway team!), our new era of agentic coding means the skills that were once best used to manage a group of engineers may now also be well used to manage the work of agents who are supporting the work of those engineers. How much harder can it be to tell an agent to do something than an engineer, anyway? Dave Griffith helps you prepare for a future where your CTO is coding alongside you.

Code lives forever: why mobile app releases break the rules

If you’re reading this newsletter, then you know that how you ship for mobile is entirely unlike web. But your web developer counterparts are often blissfully unaware, and this can cause problems when mobile has to advocate for itself within a wider engineering org. From version fragmentation to phased rollouts to dreaded app store review, Daniel Tome explains how mobile differs from other kinds of  development in ways that those other kinds of developers can understand, making this a post you might want to share more widely across your team.

Building AI agents in Kotlin - Part 1

Fatimazahra El Akkary kicks off a new series on building AI agents using Koog, an open-source framework from JetBrains that handles the execution loop: sending prompts, parsing tool calls, and executing them, repeating until done. She shows off how to create a coding agent that can explore directory listings, read files, and make edits where it sees fit, allowing it to analyze your project and apply code changes autonomously using the LLM of your choice.

Runway wrapped 2025

With the end of the year approaching, we’re sure you've seen a bunch of "Wrapped" content already. Are you tired of it? Can any of it beat Granola's "Crunched"? We hope the answers to those questions are "no" and "yes", because we put together our own recap of the year in mobile releases as shipped by Runway teams.

Before you thaw your code freeze and gear up for a new year of releases, take a quick look back at how teams released their apps this past year.

About 50% of teams released biweekly, while 34% maintained a speedy weekly cadence. Normal releases took around 6 days from kickoff to release.
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Teams averaged a bit less than 1 hotfix every other release. And when hotfixes were required, they got shipped in about 40 hours. Teams using Runway’s Fixes flow added about 2 late cherry-picks per release.
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Product work waited about 25 days between being ticketed and being worked on, about 6 days in active development, and about 9 days from being merged into trunk and going live.

219 commits were committed and 11 tickets were completed in the average release.

Teams built an average of 3 release candidates per release, with 13% of RCs failing and total build time of 4.5 days over the year.

Teams changed up their app store release notes for 18% of releases.

On the Apple side of the house, an average submission spent 17 hours waiting for review and 1.5 hours in review. Submissions were rejected 7.5% of the time.
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(Note: the data presented generally considers medians, and standard deviation is quite large in many cases!)

Posts we wrote and live events we're hosting

[Live event] The right way to automate mobile releases

Many mobile teams consider their releases “automated,” yet still rely on a fragmented mix of scripts, CI jobs, and human coordination to ship each build. In this panel discussion, experts from Runway, Tuist, and top mobile teams will discuss the difference between build automation, CI-driven workflows, and full release orchestration, along with practical ways teams can make their release process more predictable and efficient, and less stressful. Join us on Feb. 26th for a grounded look at how to actually streamline mobile releases, with less tech debt along the way.

[Blog post] How to build the perfect mobile release train

To coincide with the time of year when some people build a little train around their Christmas tree or in the holiday village that they’ve been expanding every year in their quest to one day become the ultimate grandparent, Pol Piella details how to build the perfect mobile release train. Release trains are not a silver bullet (train), but they can help you ship new versions of your app more predictably, reduce risk, get feedback from users faster, and improve collaboration and planning within your team.

Runway featured feature

We're very excited to announce Runway's Release ATC: you can now chat with the Runway Slack app in DM to get all your release questions answered and even take actions on releases.

We wanted to make it dead simple for anyone on your team to access everything Runway knows about your releases and to handle tasks needed to move release cycles forward – without them having to leave the one tool they use most for day-to-day collaboration and communication.

Engineers can ask about the health of your latest rollout, or submit your next version. PMs can track down which tickets shipped when, or update a release's target kickoff date. QA can find out which latest RC they should be testing, or update testing results once they're done. And leadership can grab info about trends over time, or manage users and teams.

Access is scoped by Runway's granular user permissions, so everyone automatically has the ability to do exactly and only what they're allowed to do, with no extra oversight needed.
To get started, just open up a DM with the Runway Slack app and say hello! Or head to our site for more info on this and other AI-powered features.

Events

Runway events this month will mostly involve each of us going to our own various holiday and New Year’s festivities with friends and family. We hope you have your own events planned to celebrate and relax.

Look out for us in 2026! We’ll soon share a list of all sorts of conferences, happy hours, and webinars that we’re hosting or taking part in next year.

In the meantime, you can (flight) deck the halls with the archive of our previous 27 newsletters.