How we ship GitHub Mobile every week
Article Summary
GitHub Mobile ships to production every single week with a tiny team. Their secret? Ruthless automation that turns a multi-day release process into a Saturday morning workflow.
The GitHub Mobile team built a fully automated release pipeline using GitHub Actions, fastlane, and open source tools. This deep dive from their engineering team shows exactly how they cut manual release work down to just a few human touchpoints.
Key Takeaways
- Automated workflow creates release branches, runs tests, and uploads to TestFlight every Saturday
- GitHub Issues serve as release playbooks, auto-assigned to rotating release captains via PagerDuty
- Raw commit logs auto-generate into PRs where engineers write customer-friendly release notes
- One week of beta testing catches issues before App Store submission
- Most steps are gray (automated), only final approvals and submissions stay blue (manual)
Critical Insight
By automating everything from branch creation to issue tracking to version bumps, GitHub Mobile freed their small team to focus on features instead of release mechanics.
