Alternatives

What happened to CodePush

CodePush was a service of Visual Studio App Center (Microsoft). In 2024 Microsoft announced the retirement of all of App Center, which shut down on March 31, 2025 together with hosted CodePush. It was a product decision (Microsoft focusing on Azure and GitHub), not a technical problem with CodePush. Microsoft published a standalone code-push-server for self-hosting, but its repositories were archived in May 2025 (read-only, unmaintained). The react-native-code-push SDK stopped evolving too and has growing incompatibilities with the New Architecture.

What’s available today

solution	model	strengths	limitations
EAS Update (Expo)	SaaS	the market standard; rollouts, channels, runtime fingerprint, Hermes bytecode diffing	billed per MAU; the expo-updates SDK pulls in the Expo ecosystem; no official self-hosting
hot-updater (gronxb)	open source, self-hosted	plugins for Supabase/AWS/Cloudflare; web console	small project, API still changing
Revopush, Stallion	CodePush-style SaaS	easy migration from CodePush	vendor dependency, usage-based pricing
Codemagic Patch	self-hosted	dashboard + installer	tied to Codemagic
code-push-server (Microsoft)	self-hosted	compatible with the old SDK	archived; no support

Every option updates JavaScript and assets only.

Can native code be updated?

Not in a way the stores allow:

• Apple: the Developer Program License Agreement (§3.3.1(B)) and guideline 2.5.2 forbid downloading executable code; interpreted code (JS) is allowed as long as it doesn’t change the app’s primary purpose. iOS code signing also prevents loading new native binaries.
• Google Play: the Device and Network Abuse policy forbids downloading executable code (DEX, .so) from outside Google Play. It would technically work on Android, but the app would be removed.

The right approach, and the one Airdrop takes, is to make native changes safe: every update is bound to a runtime version, so older binaries keep receiving compatible JS and new binaries only receive JS built for them.

How Airdrop is different

1. Runs on Cloudflare (Workers + D1 + R2): very low cost, no R2 egress fees, edge caching.
2. Per-file diff downloads: files are addressed by SHA-256; a device downloads only what changed and copies the rest from the update it’s running.
3. End-to-end code signing (ECDSA P-256) with the public key inside the binary: even a compromised server can’t publish code.
4. Automatic rollback on launch crashes, with the update blacklisted on that device and reported.
5. React Native 0.71+ (old and new architecture), no Expo required.

Roadmap ideas

• Binary diff of the Hermes bundle (bsdiff) for even smaller updates.
• Web dashboard with adoption and rollback charts.
• Multi-tenant accounts and organizations.
• Automatic fingerprint runtime-version policy (a hash of the native dependencies).
• Expo integration (expo export:embed already works through --bundle-dir).

Sources: Codemagic: React Native OTA tools in 2026, Bitrise: CodePush alternatives, Microsoft code-push (archived), Expo: OTA updates, Bitrise: what the app stores allow, hot-updater.