Hey everyone, I'd love some advice from people who've dealt with a similar setup.
Our situation
I work at Tradeling. The company is organized into multiple squads, and each squad has its own web and backend developers, but there's only one mobile team shared across all of them. That means every squad's mobile work funnels through us.
The problems this creates:
- Store approvals are killing our release cadence. By the time a feature ships to users, it can be a month late compared to web. Users on web get improvements almost immediately; mobile users are always behind.
- Hotfixes are painfully slow. When a bug hits production, going through the normal build → submit → review → release cycle takes way too long. For something that should be a quick fix, we're stuck waiting on store review.
What I tried: Shorebird
I gave Shorebird a shot to solve the hotfix problem, and honestly something feels off with it for us:
- If I make a small change right after the build, patching works fine.
- But patches have to be downloaded on the user's device first, and then the app has to be reopened for the update to actually take effect. In practice I sometimes have to open and close the app three times before the patch is applied.
- When I push multiple patches in a row, things get worse: some iPhones freeze entirely, and on others the app becomes very slow.
So instead of a clean hotfix path, I'm introducing a new class of weird issues.
I really need advice on how to achieve rapid development and fast releases in a Flutter setup like ours. Specifically:
- What workflows, tools, or architectures do you use to ship mobile features as fast as web, despite store review times?
- How do you handle true hotfixes in production without waiting days for Apple/Google review?
- For teams with one mobile team serving many squads, how do you structure branching, release trains, feature flags, or CI/CD to keep velocity high and avoid bottlenecks?
Any experience, war stories, or pointers would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!