Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

There is a specific kind of dread that comes with finding a critical bug in a production React Native app. The fix is usually straightforward: a broken API call, a logic error, a UI state that did not account for an edge case. You can see exactly what went wrong and exactly how to correct it. The code change might take an hour. What takes days is everything that comes after. App Store review. Google Play review. Waiting. Watching your crash reports climb.

GitHub Actions is one of the best CI/CD platforms available today. For web apps, backend services, and infrastructure automation, it’s hard to beat. Deep GitHub integration, a massive marketplace of community actions, flexible YAML-based workflows, and a pricing model that’s generous for open-source projects. There’s a reason it dominates. But if you’re building mobile apps, especially for iOS, GitHub Actions starts to fight back. Not because it’s a bad tool.

Before I ever ran Claude in my terminal, I thought I already understood AI tools pretty well. Like most people, I had used ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity for everyday tasks. Such as helping with schoolwork, organizing ideas, summarizing information, or getting through something faster when time was tight. They were useful, but they still felt separate from how real work happened.

If you’ve shipped a React Native app to production, you already know the feeling. A bug surfaces. Users are reporting it. Your fix is written, tested, and ready to go. And then you wait. Two days. Sometimes three. Occasionally five. App Store review doesn’t care that your ratings are dropping or that your support queue is filling up. It moves at its own pace, and your users experience every hour of the delay. CodePush over-the-air (OTA) updates change that equation entirely.