better-update

Self-hosted mobile release platform — OTA updates, native builds, and store submissions for Expo, React Native, Kotlin Multiplatform, and native apps (any project type via custom build commands), running on Cloudflare Workers: served from one of the world's largest edge networks, with no egress fees and a free tier that covers most apps.

What started as an OTA update server has grown into a full release pipeline: build your app locally with EAS-compatible config, manage signing credentials in an end-to-end encrypted vault, ship JS updates through channels with staged rollouts, and submit binaries to the App Store and Google Play — all against your own Cloudflare account.

Why Cloudflare

OTA updates are a CDN problem: every app launch is a manifest check, and every release ships bundles and assets to every device. Running that on Cloudflare is what makes a self-hosted release server cheap enough to be worth self-hosting.

• Every request is served from the edge. Workers run in 300+ cities worldwide, so manifest checks and asset downloads are answered from a data centre near the device instead of a single origin region — no CDN to bolt on, no cache tier to configure, no multi-region rollout.
• No egress fees. R2 stores update bundles, assets and build artifacts with zero bandwidth charges. Bundle downloads are the dominant cost of any OTA service, and on R2 they cost nothing to serve — which is exactly why hosted alternatives meter them.
• The free tier covers real apps. Workers (100k requests/day), D1 (5 GB) and R2 (10 GB) fit a small-to-mid app entirely inside free limits; past that, usage-based pricing means a few dollars a month, not a per-seat or per-MAU plan.
• Nothing to operate. No servers, containers or database to patch or scale — the whole backend is a Worker, a D1 database, a KV namespace and an R2 bucket, created by one bootstrap command.

Features

OTA updates

• Expo Updates protocol-compatible update server with code signing
• Branches and channels for routing devices to releases
• Staged rollouts, rollback, revert, republish, and channel promotion
• Fingerprint-based compatibility matrix between builds and updates
• Update insights and per-device tracking

Native builds

• Local iOS and Android build pipeline mirroring EAS Build, driven by your existing eas.json + app.json — no separate config format
• Isolated staging builds (fresh install in a temp dir, frozen lockfile)
• Beyond Expo: bare React Native, Kotlin Multiplatform, and custom-command projects via project-type detection
• Store submission from the CLI: App Store upload (altool) and Google Play upload, with submission tracking on the server

Credentials and secrets

• End-to-end encrypted credential vault (age + per-user keypairs) — the server only ever stores ciphertext; keys never leave your device
• iOS distribution certificates, provisioning profiles, Android keystores, and APNs push key creation/revocation automated from the CLI
• Per-project env vars, E2E-encrypted and versioned, scoped to environments

Teams and access control

• Multi-org teams with GitHub OAuth or email/password sign-in
• IAM with policies and groups: default-deny, path-scoped permissions for members and API keys
• User-defined environments alongside built-in development/preview/production
• Audit log, analytics, webhooks, scoped API keys

Deploy your own instance

No account id, hostname or resource id is tracked in this repository — it is not tied to any deployment. Point a clone at your own Cloudflare account with:

cp .env.deploy.example .env.deploy   # your account id + hostnames
bun run bootstrap                    # create D1 + KV + R2 on your account
bun run config:gen                   # render wrangler.jsonc + app config

Without that file the repo still installs, tests and runs locally on placeholders — only deploying requires real values.

See docs/self-hosting.md for secrets, migrations and deploy.

Monorepo

Path	What it is
apps/server	API on Cloudflare Workers (D1, KV, R2), Effect-based hexagonal core
apps/web	Dashboard SPA + SSR (TanStack Start)
apps/cli	better-update CLI — builds, updates, credentials, env vars, submissions
skills/*	Agent skills — better-update teaches an agent to drive the CLI end to end
packages/*	Shared libraries: typed API client, Expo protocol, code signing, bsdiff, crypto, UI

Agent skill

skills/better-update teaches a coding agent to drive the CLI — every command, flag and the publish → branch → channel → device model. This repository is also a Claude Code plugin marketplace, so the skill installs in two commands:

/plugin marketplace add <owner>/better-update   # or a path to your clone
/plugin install better-update@better-update

License

MIT