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Airdrop

Introduction

Over-the-air (OTA) updates for React Native apps: ship JavaScript and asset fixes to production without waiting for App Store / Play Store review, on infrastructure you own (Cloudflare Workers + D1 + R2).

It is a spiritual successor to Microsoft CodePush, which was retired together with App Center on March 31, 2025.

Highlights

Section titled “Highlights”
  • Works with bare React Native 0.71 → 0.87+, old and new architecture, Hermes and JSC. No Expo required (works in Expo prebuild projects too).
  • Self-hosted on Cloudflare: one Worker, one D1 database, one R2 bucket. A fleet of devices checking at startup costs about one D1 query per colo every few seconds.
  • Fast downloads: files are content-addressed and gzip-compressed; devices only download files that changed (an update that only touches JS downloads just the bundle).
  • Safe by default
    • automatic rollback: if a new update crashes before the app renders, the next launch goes back to the previous bundle and that update is never installed again;
    • every file is verified with SHA-256; optional end-to-end code signing (ECDSA P-256) with the public key baked into the binary, so even a compromised server cannot push code;
    • updates are bound to a runtime version, so JS never runs against native code it wasn’t built for; installing a new store build discards older OTA updates.
  • Release controls: channels (staging/production), staged rollouts (1–100%), mandatory updates, instant server-side rollback, promote between channels, install/rollback stats.

What about native code?

Section titled “What about native code?”

Only JavaScript and assets can be updated over the air. Apple (Developer Program License Agreement / App Review Guideline 2.5.2) and Google Play (Device and Network Abuse policy) forbid downloading executable native code, and iOS code signing makes it technically impossible anyway. Instead, react-native-airdrop makes native changes safe: an update only reaches binaries with the same runtime version. See How it works.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”