Illapush
Over-the-air updates for Expo apps, without going through the stores. It started as our own infrastructure and is now a product.
- Industry
- Developer tools
- What we did
- Own product: infrastructure, portal and CLI
- Platforms
- Web · CLI
- Year
- 2026
01 — The challenge
Fix in minutes, not in days of review.
Expo apps can receive updates without going through the App Store or Play Store, but the official service charges by active users.
With several apps in production we needed something of our own: cheap to run, fully under our control and with no third-party dependency.
02 — How we approached it
One server for every app.
A single edge deployment serves the updates for all our apps, with a portal to follow adoption and a CLI to publish.
Edge and storage
API on Cloudflare Workers and bundles on R2: fast worldwide and low cost.
Rollouts and rollback
Release to 10, 25 or 50% of users and roll back with one click if something fails.
Channels per environment
Separate production, staging and beta channels, with every update signed.
03 — What we solved
It already ships the updates for our apps.
- Used in production by Dr Pharma Salud.
- Publishing from CI or from the terminal with one command.
- Gradual rollouts with immediate rollback.
- Next step: Illapush as a service for other teams.
04 — Stack
- Cloudflare Workers
- Hono
- R2
- PostgreSQL
- Drizzle
- React
- Vite
- Expo Updates
- CLI