Channels & Releases

Administrator

Channels & Releases in the OTA Updates area (Manage) — route /ota.

Updated August 10, 2026

Channels & Releases lives in the OTA Updates area of the dashboard, under Manage.

At a glance#


Dashboard route	`/ota`
Area	OTA Updates (`ota`)
Group	Manage
Platforms	Available for every app platform.
Note	This entry points outside its area's usual `/{area}/{slug}` pattern.

What it does#

A channel is a named lane that bundles are published to — for example default, beta or production. Every release targets exactly one channel, and a device receives updates from the channel its build is bound to. This is how a single app can have an unstable beta stream and a stable production stream at the same time, from the same publishing pipeline.

Publishing to a channel that does not exist yet creates it; the first publish always creates default. Staging versus production is expressed by the channel you publish to and the environment it belongs to — there is no separate "staging flag" on a bundle.

When to use it#

Before your first release, to decide how many streams you want. Two — a testing channel and a production channel — is enough for most teams.
When you want to try a bundle on a subset of your own builds before it reaches everyone: point internal or QA builds at a beta channel and publish there first.

Publishing to a channel#

From the CLI:

Text

scalebun ota publish --app-id <id> --channel production --platform ios

scalebun ota channels --app-id <id> lists the channels an app has. In the dashboard, the Channels & Releases tab creates channels (names are stored lower-cased) and shows the releases currently live on each.

How a device picks its channel#

A build is associated with a channel through its client key and environment, so channel resolution happens server-side at check time — you do not hard-code a channel name into the app to move it between streams. Rebinding a build to a different channel is a configuration change, not a new store release.

Limits and edge cases#

A bundle belongs to one channel. To promote the same code from beta to production you publish (or promote) it to the other channel; it is not shared across channels implicitly.
Deleting a channel does not un-ship bundles already installed on devices — those devices keep running the last bundle they applied until they check again.

Where the data comes from#

Served by