Strava Mobile App Versions
Article Summary
Jeff Remer from Strava explains why their mobile app jumped from version 5.14 to 14.0 in just four months. Spoiler: it wasn't feature bloat.
Strava's engineering team ships mobile updates every two weeks through a process called Cadence. When they automated their release process in early 2017, they made a controversial decision: couple the app version number directly to their release branch number, abandoning traditional semantic versioning.
Key Takeaways
- Biweekly releases meant jumping from v6.0 to v14.0 in four months
- Coupled branch names with version numbers to simplify automation
- Each major version doesn't signal breaking changes, just a new release cycle
- Kept major.minor.patch format for flexibility despite not following semver spec
Critical Insight
Strava prioritized release automation and internal clarity over external versioning conventions, treating each biweekly release as a major version bump.
