When Microsoft decided on Visual Studio App Center Retirement, many teams — including ours — were left with broken CI flows, missing UI tools, and no reliable OTA (Over-the-Air) deployment process…

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Following the retirement of Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center, mobile teams faced disruption in OTA deployment processes for React Native apps. To address this, one team developed a self-hosted CodePush solution using a community fork, replacing Azure Blob Storage with AWS S3 and building a custom frontend UI. The deployment involved several steps including setting up Kubernetes clusters and secure GitHub authentication. Teams starting new projects are advised to consider Expo for easier OTA updates. The meticulous self-hosting journey offers full control despite its challenges.

From Deprecated to Production-Grade: Self-Hosting CodePush for React Native