Preview updates

Learn how to preview updates in development, preview, and production builds.

Before deploying an update to production, you will often want to test it in a production-like environment. This guide will outline different approaches for previewing updates, and link out to more detailed guides for each approach.

Previewing updates in development builds

Development builds are a great way to preview updates from pull requests, directly from the EAS dashboard, or from the built-in UI provided by the expo-dev-client library.

Previewing updates in preview builds

Non-technical users will typically not want to interact with a development build, and they will want to test changes from a preview build on an App store testing track or internal distribution.

If your team is smaller, it may be sufficient to deploy a single preview build at a time to an app store testing track or internal distribution. You can then publish updates to the channel that is used by that preview build. Learn more about preview builds.

Alternatively, you can build a mechanism into your preview build that allows users to select a different update or channel to load. This can be useful in cases where the app runtime doesn't change often, and many different updates can be loaded in the same app. Learn more.

Previewing updates in production builds

Before deploying an update to all end-users, some teams will want to first roll it out in production to a small set of internal users. One way this can be accomplished is by overriding the update channel at runtime for a known subset of users. Be sure to note the security considerations before proceeding down this path. Additionally, it is not recommended to use this approach for non-internal users because it makes it possible to get the app into a state where it must be uninstalled and reinstalled.

Another approach is to use a deployment pattern like the Persistent Staging Flow, which involves always having a version of your production app that points to a staging channel.