Product Updates

Keep your team aligned and up-to-date on release schedules and milestones with new release calendar views

The timelines around releases are an important part of the human process that plays out: you need to set expectations with stakeholders and make sure everyone on your team has a clear understanding of when any given release is expected to kick off, submit, release, and roll out. Most teams try to create some kind of shared release calendar, but there are so many dependencies and inevitable deviations from the happy path that it’s tedious to maintain.

Given that Runway has all the context needed to pull together an accurate picture of release schedules and milestones — and keep it all updated for you — we’ve added new release schedule views in the platform. Both per release and at app level (across all releases), Runway populates a calendar with key lifecycle events like kickoff, submission, and release, as well as info on every step of a phased or staged rollout. In addition to seeing the actual timing of events as they occur and any upcoming targets that are explicitly scheduled (e.g. with a recurring release cadence you have configured), Runway can even predict events for upcoming releases based on timing of your past releases.

Unlimited options for monitoring, alerting, and automating based on release health with a new custom metrics endpoint

Many teams already rely on Runway’s rollouts functionality to build (and act on) a more complete picture of app health, combining signals from crash reporting tools, observability and product analytics platforms, and the app stores. But we know teams are using even more kinds of tools to capture data like this, and many have their own data pipelines set up in-house.

Now, you can stream any and all custom data into Runway using a new API endpoint to surface and use in the rollouts context, just like any other data from Runway’s out-of-the-box integrations. Runway will surface your custom data on time series graphs and you can create health metrics with thresholds set for alerting and rollout automations.

Ensure your team is seeing the same picture whether they’re relying on calendars in or out of Runway, with a new calendar integration

Even with our new release schedule views, it’s likely that folks on your team who spend less time in Runway will rely on calendars outside the platform for information on release timelines and milestones. On the flipside, folks relying on Runway’s calendars might worry that they’re missing important one-off or ad hoc events which are relevant to a release but added only to their team’s external calendar.

Our newest integration type allows you to connect your team’s external calendar to Runway to ensure everything stays aligned. In one direction, you can have Runway automatically sync your Runway release schedules to your external calendar, adding and updating events as needed. In the other direction, Runway can also pull in any additional events created in your team’s external calendar so that your Runway calendar views will always show a complete view of your schedules.

(Currently supported for Google Calendar, with Outlook on our radar — reply to this email to let us know you’re interested!)

A quicker and easier way to catch crashes and other issues caused by feature flag changes, with flag diffing on rollouts

Some of the trickiest app health issues to track down are the ones caused by feature flag changes as opposed to new binary releases. Flag changes are more dynamic and harder to stay on top of, and it can take teams quite a while to connect the dots when a flag change made by someone, somewhere on the team causes a new crash or breaks an important flow in the app.

With your feature flagging tool integrated in Runway, we now perform continuous diffing on your flags to capture not just “on/off” changes but other updates to progressive rollouts, variations, audiences, etc. In addition to surfacing the resulting diffs in feature flag lists in the platform, we also overlay flag changes on your rollout graphs. That way, if you see a spike or dip in an important metric, you have immediate context on any flag changes that were made around that time and some hints as to a possible root cause.

Build funnels and other complex health metrics for rollout monitoring and automations using a new “calculated metric” type

While Runway’s existing metric types give you plenty of ways to monitor health signals from observability and analytics tools, and alert and automate rollouts based on thresholds you set, we understand that teams often want to consider more complex aspects of app health. Certain funnels, conversions and computed values were harder to get at.

Runway now lets you build more complex health metrics based on existing building blocks. All you need to do is select one or more of your existing metrics in Runway, then enter an expression describing how those metrics should be put together. For example, to look at a conversion from user signup to checkout, you might select your “signups per DAU” and “checkouts per DAU” metrics and enter the expression “checkouts per DAU”/”signups per DAU”. Any mathematical expression is valid, and you can even combine metrics from different integrations for a powerful new way to monitor health.

Easily share certain builds with a wider audience using new public build buckets in Build Distro

When distributing pre-production builds, many use cases call for an easy way to share builds with folks who may be a bit further from your immediate team — perhaps internal stakeholders who wouldn’t otherwise spend time in Runway, or even people outside your company. At the same time, you don’t want to overprovision access or jeopardize the security of builds that should be locked down to a specific audience.

Now, you have the option of enabling public access on any of your build buckets in Build Distro. When you enable this on a bucket, you’ll get a public link which allows anyone to access and install any builds in that bucket. No other buckets or areas of Runway will be accessible to users accessing via these public links.

New integrations: Dynatrace, Bitbucket Pipelines (and Google Calendar)

In addition to the entirely new calendar integration type highlighted above, we added two new options at existing integration points in Runway. Dynatrace is our latest stability monitoring integration, for surfacing crash-free and adoption rates in the rollout context, and Bitbucket Pipelines is a new option for CI/CD.

Give your team even easier access to builds with build info and install links automatically posted on project management tickets

We know that not all of your team spends time in Runway – but a lot of those folks are still impacted and involved in different parts of your release process. That’s why one of our goals as we build out the platform is to make everyone’s lives easier and keep everyone on the same page, no matter where they spend most of their day-to-day tools-wise. Runway acts as coordinator between all team members and tools, and this latest automation is a great example of that.

For any project management tickets that are part of a release, Runway can now automatically post comments containing build information and install links for release candidates that contain code associated with a given ticket. This gives your team a quick and easy way to access test builds for a given item of work from the ticket side, and can be especially helpful for folks like Product and QA who spend more of their time in your project management tool.

Each ticket comment will include:

• The build number and workflow name
• A link to the build in your CI
• If the build produced an app store build (e.g. a build in TestFlight), an install link for that build as well
• A list of all associated commits that were included in the build

This new automation is also available in the Build Distro context. If enabled, Runway will look at the diff between a given build and the preceding build in the same Build Distro bucket and will post a comment on any tickets referenced by code items in that diff. In this context, the comment will include some extra build details and a direct link to view and install the build in Build Distro.

Keep your team up-to-date on live, in-flight and upcoming releases across all apps in your org with biweekly digest emails

Sticking with the theme of giving your team quick access to release info and better visibility around the state of releases, even outside of Runway – you’re probably familiar with our various types of notifications and release announcements, and our Slack slash commands. Now, we’ve added a new way for team members and other stakeholders across your org to stay on top of mobile releases.  

With Runway’s new biweekly release digest emails, any member of your Runway organization can get a regular digest containing key info about your live, next-up, and upcoming releases for all apps delivered straight to their email inbox. These emails include things like adoption stats across live versions, detailed stability and observability metrics as configured in Runway, info about release schedules and timing, an overview of pending and completed work and fixes, upcoming release pilots, and direct links into Runway for each release in question.

More ways to monitor and automate rollouts with filtering for observability and analytics metrics

Runway’s rollout features help your team to stay on top of app quality as you release each new version, allowing you to integrate and pull in signals from all the different tools you use to track health and performance. One of the available integration points is with observability and analytics tools, and so far you’ve been able to select key events and monitor them in a number of different ways: by event volume per session or daily active user, or by looking at event property values (measured as averages, means, percentiles, etc.).

Now, you can also track filtered events for an even more granular way to surface exactly the kinds of indicators of app health that your team cares about. For any given event in your integration settings, the property field now lets you enter a string with property names and values to filter using basic query string syntax. For example, if you have a page_load event and want to measure unsuccessful loads on a "cart" screen, you might enter name=cart&error=true for the property value. You can also use greater-than and less-than operators. Just like any other metrics you configure in Runway, you can define acceptable thresholds for these new filtered metrics and they can be included in alerts and used as conditions for Runway’s rollout automations.

Easier options for building on top of Runway, with more customizable webhooks and new API endpoints

Many teams use Runway’s outgoing webhooks and API to extend the platform and integrate it more deeply with their unique tech stacks and release processes, so we’re devoting resources to a number of projects that increase just how extensible Runway is.

One update in this area is that you can now customize the headers and payloads of your outgoing webhooks in Runway, to suit the needs of the endpoints receiving each event on your team’s side. This can help you avoid needing to set up and maintain servers to handle webhooks from Runway. For example, many CI providers offer some out-of-the-box way to accept incoming webhooks (to trigger a workflow, say) but they require certain headers be passed and you may want to include additional parameters in a payload. Now that you can add those headers and payloads to your webhooks in Runway, you have a really simple way to trigger bespoke actions to all sorts of triggers in Runway.

We’re also continuing to expand the Runway API (endpoint requests are always welcome!) and one addition worth calling out is the new “Get all events” endpoint. You’ve probably seen the detailed event logs that Runway surfaces in the dashboard — this endpoint opens up a programmatic way to access those granular breadcrumb trails of release updates and changes. You can filter by app and version as needed.

More ways to sync app store metadata with a new automation that can pull straight from your repo into the stores

Runway already offers teams a few different options for managing app store metadata within the platform and automatically syncing it up to App Store Connect, Play Console, and the other stores we integrate with. These existing options are generally UI-centric, designed for marketing or product folks who may be the ones managing metadata release to release. But we know that many teams choose to check their app’s metadata into version control in their repo, and then grab the metadata from there when they’re ready to update in the app stores.

If your team follows the version control approach, you can now have Runway automatically read all the store metadata from your repo and sync it with the app stores. Leveraging your existing version control integration in Runway, you simply enable the new automation, specify the file path where metadata lives in your repo, and Runway will automatically grab metadata and populate it in the stores as each release is kicked off. Localized metadata is supported and uses the same key specifications as fastlane does.

Avoid getting caught out by expiring Apple profiles, certs, and agreements, with automated alerts and reminders

Just about every Apple developer has experienced the frustration caused by provisioning profiles and signing certificates that expire when you least expect them to. Same with new or updated agreements in App Store Connect, which can cause even more disruption: you need to track down whoever on your team is authorized to handle those agreements, and maybe even get legal folks involved (read: lots of wasted time and delayed releases).

Avoid unwelcome surprises and the domino effect they cause with new reminder notifications in Runway. For provisioning profiles and signing certificates, we monitor the expiration dates of any active profiles and certs in App Store Connect and start sending reminders as expiries approach (you can configure when these reminders start). We’ll also send alerts whenever new or updated agreements need to be accepted. Like all notifications in Runway, you can choose one or more channels to send these new notification types to, and can @-mention individuals or groups in them so nothing gets missed.

Even more ways to make sense of code and tickets with new groupings, filters, and support for custom fields in the Feature Readiness view

Based on feedback from our teams, we continue to evolve the Feature Readiness view to allow everyone on your team to get exactly the kind of view of feature work they’re looking for, across both code and project management tickets. One recent addition is a new “Group by ticket” lens. As the name suggests, enabling this lens will render a Feature Readiness view that keys primarily off of project management tickets – if multiple items of code refer to the same ticket, they’ll be grouped under that ticket on a single row. For Jira teams, we also added support for custom fields: specify as many custom fields as you like in your integration settings and they’ll be available as filters in Feature Readiness, as well as surfaced in each item’s details drawer. Finally, we added more out-of-the-box filters including ticket type and ticket priority.

New integrations: Samsung Galaxy Store and Opsgenie

We have two new integrations to highlight in this edition of updates. Samsung Galaxy Store is our newest app store integration, opening up yet another available destination for your Android builds and allowing you to manage metadata and screenshots, handle submission and release, track user reviews, and more. And, Opsgenie is now an available option at our scheduling integration point. With Opsgenie integrated, Runway can manage your release pilot rotation based on an Opsgenie schedule, automatically assigning pilots to releases, swapping people when coverage changes, and re-assigning pilots if a release rolls over into another team member’s shift – with reminders and alerts along the way.

Catch even more kinds of app issues, faster, with Runway’s new AI-powered user review analysis

App store reviews can provide an unexpectedly valuable window into your app’s health, highlighting issues that might not otherwise surface in crash reports, observability data, or product analytics. But it’s difficult to actually leverage reviews as part of your team’s overall health monitoring strategy. If you have a lot of users there are simply too many reviews to sift through, and no matter how many users you have there’s still lots of noise that has nothing to do with the app’s functionality – “Terrible customer service”, “My order was late”, etc.

Now, Runway can help you separate signal from noise so you can make the most of user reviews as an additional indicator of app health. We use AI to analyze all of your incoming app store reviews and identify common issues mentioned in them, surfacing these issues (alongside specific examples pulled directly from the reviews) on each release’s Rollout page. Simply evaluating for sentiment isn’t enough, since that would include reviews which have nothing to do with the app, so Runway considers the context of your company and app in order to single out bugs and broken functionality.

Less copy-pasting into Google Translate or ChatGPT with automatic user review translations

Sticking with the store reviews theme, there’s a new automation in Runway that will automatically translate any non-English reviews and surface those translations alongside the original reviews in Slack (if you have store review notifications enabled). Avoid the multiple tabs and back and forth with translation tools when you need to figure out what users are saying about your app!

More granular user access and better ways to organize your team with custom user groups

Until now, you’ve used the “roles” functionality to scope access and group users in Runway. But because roles can be used in so many different ways in the platform — not just for RBAC and organization purposes, but also for things like notification pings, checklist item ownership, and syncing users between integrations — teams have been telling us they want to be able to create and manage their own roles. Now, you can do exactly that.

Runway’s roles functionality has expanded into what is now called “groups”. You can create as many custom groups as you like, assigning subsets of users and a list of permissions to each, and you can use these groups to segment users by role, team, or any other functional grouping within your org. As before, you can do things like: assign groups as owners on checklist items, regression testing items, and approval items; set up mapping to your Slack user groups so that folks are pinged in certain notifications from Runway; configure directory sync to automatically bridge from teams and groups in your company’s internal directory to groups in Runway; add groups as members on Build Distro buckets; and more.

Even more control over rollouts with checklist items and gating for automatic acceleration

As our team often likes to say, your job isn’t done when you hit the button to release — or when Runway releases for you automatically! Running rollouts is a critical part of the overall mobile release cycle, and there’s already a lot you can do in Runway to automate and safeguard this part of the process. Now, we’ve released a couple of new additions to give you even more control as you roll out.

First, we brought Runway’s checklist items functionality to the Rollout page so you can assign and track any post-release tasks the team needs to perform. Like checklist items elsewhere, you can set up automatic reminders and interact with them via our API and webhooks for extensibility.

Building on top of that, you can now also gate Runway’s rollout acceleration automation based on one or more checklist items. Runway will monitor your rollout and configured health metrics as usual, but even if health and adoption conditions are met, Runway won’t trigger the acceleration to 100% unless all required checklist items are also complete. This gives your team a powerful way to combine automation with human inputs that bring additional context, influencing whether you want to accelerate a rollout or not. Notifications can also be sent if conditions are met but checklist items are still incomplete.

Chase down pending work — with less actual chasing — using a new reminder action in Feature Readiness

The Feature Readiness view in Runway is designed to give your team a crystal clear picture of everything you’re shipping, as well as any pending work that’s expected to ship with a given release. Being able to visualize incomplete items and potential blockers is helpful in and of itself, but you often need to take that info and then go track down the people or teams responsible.  

To help you quickly follow up on outstanding items and make sure your releases stay on schedule, we’ve added a “Ping all pending owners” action to the Feature Readiness step. When you click the button to ping, Runway will send a notification into Slack tagging the respective owners of the code and/or project management tickets associated with the pending work.

Support for retained builds in Google Play Console

Many Android teams need to include older builds alongside new ones in each release they ship, to maintain support for certain form factors or other segments of their audience. Previously, in order to do that, teams would have to remember to manually select the older builds to retain on the submission step in Runway for each and every release. Now, you can select any builds to be retained just once and Runway will automatically include those builds alongside your new builds each time you submit and release (or until you clear the retained builds in Runway).

New integrations: Huawei AppGallery and Lokalise

There are two new additions to Runway’s integrations, in two different domains. Huawei AppGallery is our latest app store integration, giving you yet another destination to ship your Android builds to (with even more destinations on the way - see below!). And at Runway’s translations integration point, you can now hook up Lokalise to better visualize the state of localizable strings for each release, and sync changes across your codebase, Lokalise, and even the app stores for localized metadata.

Find the exact build you’re looking for in seconds with search for Build Distro

In designing Build Distro’s bucketing structure, our goal was to help teams take the laundry list of different builds they distribute and break it down into logical groupings based on audience and build flavor. But even with clearer groupings, team members often need to grab builds from various buckets and it can still be hard to find the exact build you’re looking for at any given time.

To help users get to the right build in seconds, we added global search to Build Distro. You can search by build number or against other fields like commit message or PR title.

More ways to interact with Build Distro programmatically using new public API endpoints

Runway’s out-of-the-box integrations with a range of different CI providers give teams a quick and easy way to spin up Build Distro buckets and automatically ensure the right builds get distributed to the right places. But there are plenty of reasons why a team might want lower-level access to manage builds and buckets directly, and we’ve been prioritizing work to expand Build Distro’s footprint in our public API. Our latest additions include endpoints that allow you to upload builds and create, read, and update buckets.

Details – and a sneak peek at more endpoints that are on their way shortly – are available in our API documentation.

Less waiting around — then scrambling and copy-pasting — to update release notes and metadata, and less wrangling to handle localized copy for the stores

Managing screenshots and metadata for the app stores can be one of the biggest offenders when it comes to wasted time and context-switching during releases. For one, the stores limit when you can actually go update release notes and metadata for an upcoming version, often turning this part of the process into a last minute scramble and a lot of copy-pasting, with engineers needing to track down and loop in product or marketing help and then quickly update everything in the stores. Plus, if your app is localized, you can multiply that scramble by the number of languages you serve, with extra work to send out new metadata for translation and then pull the translations back in before submission (ideally without any languages slipping through the cracks!).    

To help your team avoid the rush to get store release metadata sorted, and even allow you to plan ahead, you can now update release notes and metadata for upcoming releases as early as you like. As soon as a release exists in Runway, you can navigate in and save release notes and metadata, ahead of time. Runway will monitor the status of the release in store and automatically take care of syncing any updates as soon as it’s possible to do so — no manual copy-pasting required!

You can also leverage Runway’s translations integration to get a head start on metadata localization. If you opt in to have your translation integration handle metadata, each metadata field will reflect a status that lets you see at a glance what needs to be uploaded for translation, what’s still in the process of being translated, and what’s translated and ready for export to the app store. Whenever you’re ready, you can trigger an export of all translated metadata, which automatically syncs it to the store directly from your translations provider.

You can also automate this entire process by enabling the new “Sync metadata translations” automation. With the automation enabled, all you have to do is make the desired changes to a release’s metadata for your source language only. Runway will automatically upload everything for translation, watch the status of translations, and export completed translations to the app store as soon as they’re ready.

Easier coordination and less confusion around multiple submission items in App Store Connect, with support for in-app events and custom product pages

New app versions aren’t the only things you need to submit for review in App Store Connect. For teams that take advantage of Apple’s in-app events or custom product pages, you’ll know that these items also need to undergo review before they go live. You’ll also know that you can only have one submission in review at a time. While Apple does let you combine new app versions with additional submission items to submit all together, this calls for a lot of extra coordination across the team — and often across disciplines, given folks like marketing are typically involved for in-app events and custom product pages. It can be difficult to make sure everything is ready to go at once, and seeing status and submitting multiple submission items in App Store Connect can be cumbersome and confusing (especially for less technical contributors).    

Now, your team can handle in-app events and custom product pages alongside app version submissions in Runway for a clearer and easier way to coordinate across multiple submission items. On the Submission step in your iOS releases in Runway, you can now select one or more in-app events and custom product pages to queue up for submission alongside your app versions. All the different kinds of items that are selected for submission are visualized on the step, and when you’re ready to proceed (whether manually or automatically), Runway takes all of those items and submits them for review together.

Instantly unblock iOS app submissions when other submissions are in the way

Building on our new support for additional submission items, Runway now also gives you an easy way to resolve the frustrating roadblocks that crop up when coordination around multiple submission items breaks down. Odds are you’ve experienced this kind of scenario before. Someone on one side of the org spins up a new in-app event, custom product page or product page optimization and excitedly submits it for review in App Store Connect, unaware that there’s a new app version scheduled for submission shortly thereafter. When their teammates go to submit the new version, they’re met with an error explaining that they can’t proceed because other items are already submitted. A whole back-and-forth ensues to figure out what’s already submitted and what needs to be submitted, then a bunch of clicking around in App Store Connect to remove items and resubmit.  

Runway’s “unblock submission” action seamlessly resolves this kind of situation with a single click. Alongside full context on all your submission items on the Submission step, when Runway detects a state that is blocking your app submission, we surface a button that allows you to instantly pull all blocking submission items from the queue or from review, then re-add each of those items alongside the build you want to submit so that you can easily proceed by submitting all items together.

Better visibility around Android release states with a workaround for the infamous Edits.tracks status bug

IYKYK, and many of you have probably heard us talk about this before: there’s a longstanding issue with the Play Console Publisher API whereby releases transition immediately from a draft status to live, even if they get flagged for review by Google, and even if you have managed publishing enabled and haven’t yet hit the button to release. This creates a pretty difficult blind spot for anyone building tooling on top of the Publisher API, since you can’t know for sure whether a given version is actually live in the Play Store. In Runway, we’ve had to make less-than-ideal accommodations to deal with this, like optimistically considering releases as live immediately after submission, and giving teams a way to manually signal to Runway that we should start an automated staged rollout for them.

Judging from this issue that’s been open with Google for years, they don’t plan on fixing this anytime soon — so we decided to build a workaround. If you simply forward your Google publishing update emails to Runway, we’ll use those to determine when your releases actually go live. Runway uses the broader context we have about your team's release cycles and timing at different stages to match emailed updates to the right releases, and to understand release status accordingly. The first piece of user-facing functionality that builds on top of this is a new Slack notification that goes out as soon as each release is actually live, and we plan to tie more features to this in future.

Even more ways to understand the work your team releases, with search, more filters, and filter persistence for Feature Readiness

Making sense of all the work that’s shipping — or expected to ship — with each release can be a daunting task. There are tickets to comb through, commits and PRs to check on, product owners and code owners to track down. Runway’s Feature Readiness view already helps teams by creating a unified view across all these important pieces of the puzzle, but we heard from teams that they wanted more options for slicing and dicing this view to get at exactly the info they need.

We’ve added new functionality to the Feature Readiness view to help everyone on your team get exactly the view they’re looking for. To allow you to quickly find a specific work item in Feature Readiness, we’ve added search. You can drill into fields across both tickets and code, searching within commit messages, PR descriptions, and much more. There are also new filters available on Feature Readiness: for PR label or milestone, for ticket label or fix version, and one that will hide any unsquashed commits, showing only merged PRs or direct commits.

To allow you to build your preferred view on Feature Readiness and then keep it, we added persistence of filters and sort so that you can navigate away and then return exactly where you left off.

Supercharge navigation across apps and releases in Runway using just your keyboard with the new Quick Actions Menu

If you’re a Runway power user – or perhaps just someone who prefers to move across apps with just their keyboard – Runway’s new Quick Actions Menu allows you to do just that. Quickly switch across apps, releases, or navigate to specific settings for your app by invoking the Quick Action Menu, which surfaces shortcuts to many of the most important pages within Runway. Enter command + K/ctrl + K from anywhere in Runway to invoke the Quick Action Menu and use it to supercharge how you navigate across pages.

Zoom into specific events within a release with event timeline search

One of the powerful ways in which Runway provides greater visibility into the release process across the entire team is with its rich and detailed timeline for each and every release, with timeline events broken out into (and accessible from) the most relevant release step within which they occurred. Timeline events can be an invaluable resource in many scenarios, like for example, during a post-mortem if you’re looking to track down specific actions involved or understand a sequence of events. And now it’s even easier to leverage Runway’s release timeline to zoom into specific events with search, which is now available on the timeline across all the places it appears.

More CI providers supported for Build Distro and artifact automations

Runway’s ability to handle artifacts produced as part of build runs is just a subset of the broader functionality that comes with our CI integrations. But it’s an important one for certain artifact automations on the mobile release management side (artifact upload, attachment to releases in version control, etc.), and an especially important one for Build Distro. We’ve expanded our support for artifact handling to cover many more of the CI integrations we already offer. Azure Pipelines, Jenkins, Xcode Cloud, and Buildkite are the latest integrations that are now supported for Build Distro and artifact automations.

Fixes by Runway

In case you missed it, last week we announced a big new feature: Fixes. It’s designed to help teams better manage their release diffs, offering a safer and more consistent way to get late-arriving changes into a release if needed. Fixes applies real guardrails that allow you to track, review, and approve any late additions, and automates away the busywork and context-switching required to actually get changes pulled in.

For some background on the launch and detail on how Fixes works, you can read more on the Runway blog!

Avoid accidentally shipping a release with untranslated strings – plus trigger and sync translations automatically – with Runway’s newest integration capability

If your app is available in more than a single language, you’re likely familiar with the extra work and headaches that the translation process can add to every release. You need to keep careful watch across all your localizable strings to ensure new copy is fully translated and that the translated strings made it safely into the release diff. The translation process adds (yet another) asynchronous element to release cycles, since translations are often sent out and finalized as other release prep continues in parallel. And there’s uncertainty around situations in which the team might be okay proceeding with certain strings untranslated, versus those where key untranslated strings are showstoppers.

Now, you can integrate your team’s translation and localization tooling in Runway, and we’ll help you avoid mistakes and save time when it comes time to prepare app copy for release.

Runway surfaces all the localizable strings in your project and computes readiness relative to each release, so you can see at a glance which strings are fully ready to go – uploaded, translated, pulled back into the codebase (and onto your release branch, where applicable) – and which are still pending. Extra context on pending strings helps your team identify what’s actually needed to get things wrapped up. Perhaps translations are actually complete but the translated strings have yet to be pulled down into the release, or perhaps certain late-arriving strings are still waiting for translation. To complete the picture and further help your team identify translation showstoppers, localizable string keys added or updated in the context of a given release are highlighted.

You can trigger a source file upload or export translations back to the codebase right from Runway when needed – or, save your team the steady drip of manual work and context-switching and let Runway automate the process of keeping translations synced and updated in your project. With the new “Sync localizable string translations” automation enabled, Runway watches your release diff for any new or updated strings and will automatically upload source files for translation when needed, then pull translations back down to your release when ready. If your team prefers to merge all translations into your working branch first, there’s another new automation that can watch your working branch for updated strings and automatically pull them over into the active release.

Currently available for Crowdin, with Localize, Lokalise, Smartling, and others to follow.

Keep your release pilot rotation in sync with another new integration type: scheduling

Most of you are probably already familiar with the release pilot rotation in Runway, which allows you to set up a list of team members that we’ll iterate through to automatically assign as pilots (aka captains, drivers, etc.) on each release. You can manage your rotation within Runway, reordering and swapping in one-off subs as needed, and pilots have a special role to play with targeted reminders and action items that make it easier for folks to rotate into the role.

But we know that teams often use specific tools for scheduling rotations more broadly within their org, like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or even Google Calendar. In true Runway fashion, we want to ensure you get the best of both worlds by offering an integration point for these specialized tools that Runway can tie into and extend from. Now, you can now connect your scheduling tool of choice and Runway will manage your release pilot rotation accordingly, automatically assigning pilots to releases based on a given on-call schedule, swapping folks when coverage changes, and re-assigning pilots if a release rolls over into another team member’s shift. Reminders and alerts can be sent along the way so there are no surprises or gaps in coverage.

Currently available for PagerDuty, with Opsgenie, Google Calendar, and others to follow.

More reasons to stay out of App Store Connect & Play Console, with the ability to view and edit preview videos and additional metadata fields

‍At Runway, we’re always looking for more ways to keep your team out of App Store Connect and Play Console. They’re not the friendliest of platforms and are two of the worst offenders when it comes to context-switching. You should already be able to do most if not all of what you need to do in the stores release to release from within Runway, manually or automated. But we do field feedback from teams wanting the ability to update even more of their store presence in Runway, and so we’re continuing to add more store-related functionality to the platform. Our latest additions include handling for preview videos, allowing you to view, edit, and upload new videos for both Android and iOS. On the metadata front, you can now edit promotional text, subtitle, and app name alongside the other fields Runway already surfaces. As always, Runway’s user roles and scoped access can give your marketing and product folks an easy and safe way to interact with these items.

Eliminate QA busywork and context-switching by automatically creating new test runs per release

Runway’s regression testing integrations allow your team to connect the test case management tooling your QA folks might be using (TestRail, Xray) to surface live status of test runs alongside each release. This already helps streamline a critical part of the release process by opening up what is typically a black box and removing the need for constant checking-in back and forth between engineering, product, and QA as final build validation is worked on.

Our new ‘Create regression test runs’ automation goes a step further to save time that’s wasted manually managing regression testing processes. Before, for each new release, QA folks would need to manually create a new test run in your team’s test case management tool, copying over the necessary test plans, sticking to any particular naming conventions, etc. Now Runway can handle all of this for you, ensuring there’s a new test run created and ready to go by the time QA hops in to begin regression testing each and every release.