Building Reliable Mobile Applications
Article Summary
Shopify's POS app processes billions in sales yearly. Unlike typical apps, downtime means merchants can't make sales at all.
Shopify's mobile team shares how they built reliability into a mission-critical retail app where traditional mobile constraints (slow app store reviews, delayed user updates) make quick fixes nearly impossible. This deep dive covers their evolution from ad-hoc releases to a sophisticated system handling massive scale.
Key Takeaways
- Shifted from monthly to weekly releases, reducing testing burden and stress
- Rotating Release Captain role distributes deployment work across entire team
- Air Traffic Control on-call system prevents context switching for project teams
- Anomaly detection alerts catch issues across global timezones automatically
- Beta flags and staged rollouts limit blast radius of bugs
Critical Insight
By combining automated testing, weekly release trains, dedicated on-call rotation, and staged rollouts, Shopify scaled their POS team while improving reliability for merchants processing billions annually.
