Continuous Delivery for Cross-Platform Teams

Cross-platform squads often inherit two extremes: native teams who deploy slowly but safely, and web teams who iterate fast but without the safety rails mobile requires. Harmonising their cadence is the difference between consistent product momentum and a roadmap stuck in planning purgatory.

Step 1: Define a single source of release truth

Start with a release calendar that captures:

• Branches (e.g., main for production, release/* for stabilization).
• Environments (feature previews, QA, beta, production) with owners and SLAs.
• Checklists that include design sign-off, QA validation, and rollout guardrails.

This calendar lives in the repo and powers automation. When a release branch is created, GitHub Actions notifies QA and fires off parallel pipelines for iOS, Android, and web.

Step 2: Automate beyond the tests

Automated tests are table stakes. The breakthrough happens when you also automate the supporting work:

• Semantic versioning triggered by Conventional Commits keeps version numbers predictable.
• Artifact notarisation signs iOS builds, uploads them to TestFlight, and posts the link in Slack.
• Play Store staged rollouts and Vercel traffic splitting are managed from code so reversions are a single command.

jobs:
  release-mobile:
    runs-on: macos-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
      - run: bundle exec fastlane ios release --env=production

Step 3: Make rollout health visible

Merge the deployment telemetry for all platforms into one board: crash rates, Core Web Vitals, API errors. If any signal degrades, the team can decide to halt the rollout before customers feel the pain. Combine this with a post-release huddle where leads inspect the board together. Shared visibility builds shared accountability.

Step 4: Invest in “stop the line” culture

When something breaks, the right reaction is to stop the rollout, swarm, and fix it—not to push harder. Celebrate the engineers who call a halt before an incident escalates. Keep a public changelog of incidents, remediation, and the pipeline improvements that followed.

Results worth chasing

• Weekly production trains become twice-weekly, then daily, without heroics.
• Release notes are automated, so stakeholders know what shipped.
• Engineers trust the process because it catches their mistakes early and helps them recover quickly when it doesn’t.

Continuous delivery is less about tools and more about agreements. Write the agreements down, automate them, and revisit them often.