Life after App Center: how we rebuilt CodePush from the ground up

After Microsoft announced the retirement of App Center in 2024 and shut it down in 2025, Bitrise chose to create a CodePush replacement for React Native teams needing over-the-air JavaScript and asset updates. Rather than rehost Microsoft’s aging self-hosted server, the team rebuilt it in Go around a community SDK, integrating it with Bitrise accounts, release management, GCP storage, and later its broader platform. What was initially estimated at one to three months took more than a year, involving reverse-engineering legacy behavior, resolving protocol and configuration issues, adding tests, and improving performance from roughly 100 requests per second to a level where Istio’s approximately 20,000-request-per-second limit became the bottleneck. Beta testing exposed scalability, latency, SDK retry, and usability gaps, prompting a confidential architectural redesign and the development of an AI-assisted command-line interface. Following general availability, Bitrise added code signing, initial near-real-time metrics, and Delta Updates, which deliver only the files a device needs rather than full update bundles, while the service’s development was transferred to another team that also plans to maintain the SDK.

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