Daniel Haiem is the CEO of AppMakers USA, a mobile app development agency that works with founders on mobile and web builds. He is known for pairing product clarity with delivery discipline, helping teams make smart scope calls and ship what matters. Earlier in his career he taught physics, and he still spends time supporting education and youth mentorship initiatives.
If you’ve ever shipped a mobile app, you already know the biggest risk is not the launch.
It’s the update.
Launch day is a planned event. Updates happen under pressure. A customer reports a bug. A competitor ships a feature. A stakeholder wants a fast fix. Then you push a build and hope nothing breaks.
Hope is not a release strategy.
There’s a reason stability is a competitive advantage. In AppDynamics’ App Attention Span study (a survey of 2,000 adults across the US and UK), 86% of US respondents and 82% of UK respondents said they had deleted or uninstalled at least one mobile app because of performance issues. That’s not a “nice to have” problem. It’s revenue, trust, and retention.
So at AppMakers USA, we optimize for something that sounds boring on purpose: releases that feel uneventful.
Below are three strategies we use to ship updates safely, without slowing teams to a crawl.
Strategy 1: Ship Behind Feature Flags, Not Hope
Most bad updates are not caused by a single catastrophic bug. They’re caused by shipping too much at once.
Feature flags solve that by separating “deploy code” from “turn on change.” That one separation unlocks safer workflows:
- You can merge code early and reduce long-lived branches.
- You can test in production without exposing the feature to everyone.
- You can instantly disable a risky change without waiting for App Store or Play Store review cycles.
The Practical Rule
If a change can impact user flow, pricing, payments, auth, or data integrity, it ships behind a flag.
The Flag Types We Actually Use
- Release flags for features that are not ready for everyone
- Kill switches for dangerous behaviors, like a new API path or a new checkout flow
- Ops flags for things like logging level, retry behavior, caching, and fallback modes
The Mistake Teams Make
They treat flags as temporary.
In reality, flags are an operational tool. The key is to manage them with discipline:
- Every flag has an owner
- Every flag has a purpose statement
- Every flag has an expiration date or cleanup plan
A feature flag system without cleanup becomes a junk drawer. With cleanup, it becomes your safest lever.
Strategy 2: Stage Rollouts Like You’re Running An Experiment
If you push an update to 100% of users, you are betting your brand on one build.
A staged rollout changes the math. You can release to a small percentage of users, watch the real-world signals, then expand.
Apple supports phased releases for App Store updates, and Google Play supports staged rollouts. Whether you’re iOS-first, Android-first, or shipping both, the principle stays the same:
Start small. Measure. Expand.
The Rollout “Rings” We Prefer
We typically roll out in rings, even for small apps:
- Internal ring: our team and the client’s team
- Friendly users: a controlled set of power users or beta testers
- Small production slice: a low percentage of real users
- Full release: only after metrics are steady
What We Watch During Staged Rollout
If you want a rollout to be scientific, you need the right signals.
These are the metrics that matter in the first hour:
- Crash-free sessions
- App start time and screen load time
- API error rates and latency
- Login success rate
- Payment success rate (if applicable)
- Spike in support tickets or negative reviews
The point is not perfection. The point is early detection.
The Two Rules That Keep This From Becoming Slow
- A staged rollout must be easy to pause
- A staged rollout must be easy to resume
If pausing is complicated, teams won’t do it. If resuming is painful, teams will rush.
A good rollout plan is not a document. It’s a habit.
Strategy 3: Build A Rollback Muscle Before You Need It
A rollback plan that exists only in someone’s head is not a rollback plan.
The truth is, mobile apps have unique constraints. You can’t always ship a hotfix instantly. Review times, user auto-update behavior, and device variability all slow you down.
That’s why we build rollback options that do not depend on shipping a new binary.
The “No New Build” Playbook
We like to have at least one of these available in any production app:
- A kill switch that disables the risky path
- A server-driven config that can revert behaviors
- A fallback mode that reduces scope, but keeps the app usable
If you can’t turn the blast radius down without a new build, you’re exposed.
Make Failures Obvious, Fast
The best rollback in the world is useless if you don’t detect the failure.
So we design observability into the release:
- Crash reporting and performance monitoring are in place before launch
- We track the top user journeys, not just generic errors
- We tag events by app version so we can spot regression patterns
The fastest way to lose time is to argue about whether the update caused the problem.
If you can correlate version with failure, you skip the debate and go straight to action.
Practice The Rollback
This is the part most teams skip.
You don’t want to discover your kill switch is broken during a live incident.
We’ll often run a “rollback drill” in a controlled environment:
- Turn the feature on for a small group
- Confirm the monitoring catches issues
- Flip the kill switch
- Verify the app returns to stable behavior
When that works once, the team trusts it. When the team trusts it, they use it.
The Real Competitive Advantage Is Trust
A lot of teams chase speed. I’m not against speed. I’m against reckless speed.
When releases are boring, teams can ship more often because they’re not constantly firefighting. Customers trust updates. Product teams can experiment without risking the whole app.
Our mobile app developers at AppMakers USA treat release safety like a product feature.
If you’re building an app and you want updates to feel predictable, not scary, start with these three practices: feature flags, staged rollouts, and a rollback muscle that works without shipping a new binary.
Because the best update is the one your users never notice.
About The Author: Dan Haiem is the CEO of AppMakers USA, a product development studio that helps founders and teams design, build, and scale mobile and web products.
