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Introduction: Shiply is Tencent's full-scenario release platform for apps, providing one-stop dynamic release solutions. Multiple client-cloud integrated services effectively lower technical barriers, reduce R&D costs, and help businesses quickly build stable, high-quality mobile applications. It is also an important product member of the Tencent Device-oriented Service (TDS) alliance (tds.qq.com).

Born from Tencent, Shiply distills years of mature release experience in mobile applications. It provides release management support for numerous Tencent apps with tens or hundreds of millions of users, supports agile development and rapid iteration for many internal innovative products, and is an indispensable release management platform for Tencent's internal client applications.

Over the past decade, the core evolution of client technology architecture has been improving dynamic delivery capability, placing unprecedented demands on app release infrastructure:

• Native technology: Evolved from monolithic architecture to componentization and pluginization, with core goals of module hot-plugging and issue hotfixing—shortening fix paths and improving iteration flexibility.

• Cross-platform technology: From Hybrid through RN and Flutter to KMM (Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile), evolution focuses on hot reload in development and hot update at runtime—to accelerate development and achieve runtime seamless updates.

Today, the scope of "release" has fundamentally changed: it is no longer limited to traditional install package release (store listing), but extends to dynamic release of offline packages, plugin packages, hotfix patches, cross-platform dynamic artifacts, and more—even real-time delivery of in-package resources and app configuration.

Shiply continuously explores release forms and expands release categories, building a unified release platform covering the full client lifecycle. This capability system aims to seamlessly support full-scenario release needs across different technology stacks—whether for technical optimization, new feature launches, or high-frequency operational campaigns, providing efficient, stable, and flexible release assurance.

I. Overview of Shiply Full-Scenario Release Capabilities​

Shiply provides full-scenario, full-lifecycle software delivery management, including two major release modes: install package release and dynamic release.

Traditional Install Package Release

• In-app beta distribution: Internal distribution of iOS/Harmony enterprise-signed packages and Android DailyBuild packages within the enterprise.

• In-app upgrade: Android APK in-app self-upgrade; iOS/Harmony update prompts.

• Invite and open testing: For example, iOS (TestFlight) and Harmony (AppGallery) invite testing and open testing.

• App store submission: Supports automatic package upload and submission for iOS (App Store), Android (major phone manufacturer app stores), and Harmony (AppGallery).

Dynamic Release

Deconstruct install packages into code (executable binaries, library files), configuration, and resources for partial dynamic updates:

• Cross-platform release (cross-platform code): For build artifacts of various cross-platform frameworks (Kuikly, Hippy, Flutter, React Native, etc.), supports synchronized release across multiple platforms and products, greatly improving release efficiency.

• Hotfix release (native code): Publish patches to urgently fix online issues without submitting a new install package to app stores.

• Remote resource release (resource files): Supports on-demand loading and updates of any files such as on-device AI models, themes, fonts, skins, images, animations, and SO libraries.

• Remote configuration release (configuration files): Supports dynamic updates for DSL dynamicization, routing and API dynamicization, dynamic tuning parameters, feature switches, and other scenario configurations.

Shiply's dynamic release solution aims to achieve seamless updates of app features, data, configuration, and visual styles, freeing you from dependence on app store review processes.

II. Core Value of Dynamic Release​

2.1 Meeting Agile Business Iteration Needs​

• Refined operations drive high-frequency release: Mobile internet has entered stock competition; slowing user growth requires enterprises to shift to refined operations. Businesses need frequent updates to optimize experience, run A/B test innovations, and conduct campaign operations. Traditional app store review processes (iOS takes 1–3 days) cannot meet demand; dynamic release enables "minute-level" hot updates, avoiding iteration delays that cause user churn.

• Hotspot scenarios drive rapid feature launch: Video, news, sports, and similar products must quickly respond to holiday campaigns, social hotspots, and live sports events. Sudden campaigns can cause traffic spikes requiring dynamic feature adjustments.

2.2 Solving Pain Points of Lagging Install Package Updates​

• Long user upgrade cycles: Traditional install package updates depend on user willingness to upgrade; version coverage improves slowly and version fragmentation is hard to eliminate. Dynamic release achieves user-invisible updates, ensuring all users immediately use the latest features.

• Cost of forced updates: Forced updates easily trigger user resistance; in stock competition, there is user churn risk. Dynamic release reduces risk through progressive updates.

2.3 Addressing Multi-Platform, Multi-Product Technical Challenges​

• Platform diversification: Domestic phone manufacturers' software capabilities continue improving; self-developed systems such as Harmony OS and Hyper OS keep emerging.

• Product diversification: To reach lower-tier markets, "Lite" and other multi-version apps are often needed.

As platforms and products multiply, feature reuse becomes key to reducing development costs and improving iteration efficiency, driving cross-platform development frameworks and cross-platform dynamic release needs.

2.4 Value for Users and Developers​

Seamless dynamic release can solve many pain points for users, developers, operations, and business teams:

• For users: Annoying update popups, forced exits, update failures, new version bugs affecting usage.

• For developers/operations: Tight release windows, high launch risk, user churn, slow issue fixes, poor user experience, more negative reviews, business losses.

III. Dynamic Release: Cross-Platform Release​

3.1 Pain Points of Cross-Platform Release​

Cross-platform development frameworks (Kuikly, Hippy, Flutter, React Native, etc.), with "write once, run everywhere" advantages, have become industry standards for efficiency and quality. But their release complexity far exceeds traditional release train mode:

• Release efficiency bottleneck:

  • Platform differences require separate builds for iOS, Android, Harmony, Web, and other platforms—multi-end release workload doubles;

  • Cross-platform development's flexibility of "page" as release unit means more pages lead to higher release frequency.

• Cross-app reuse complexity: Modules (such as weather modules) often serve multiple host apps (such as QQ and TIM), further amplifying release scale.

• Dependency management challenges: Module versions and host app compatibility, upgrade/downgrade management are complex.

3.2 Cross-Platform Release Solution​

To address these complex release challenges, Shiply launched the "Cross-Platform Release" solution to deeply optimize the release process.

• Bind different platform resource IDs per module: Modules support binding resource package IDs under different platforms and products, enabling unified release process management.

• Cross-end module dependency issues:

After splitting into finer modules, dependencies may form between modules. Updating a single module depends on updating underlying modules, creating dependency update dilemmas.

Shiply supports multi-module aggregated release. When the client pulls any module, the Shiply SDK updates associated modules locally together, solving potential issues from inconsistent dependency module release and download timing.

• Separately configurable release conditions

  • Flexible release: Flexibly choose to release to one or more products.

  • Powerful rules: Includes 20+ built-in system conditions for audience, region, network, system version, device model, and more. Supports profile and A/B experiment audience targeting; supports ultra-large audience packages at tens of millions scale. Provides global conditions, condition templates, custom conditions, and other rule filling methods. Supports user-defined attributes as delivery conditions—release conditions can expand infinitely.

• Automatic delta: The platform automatically generates delta packages for the last N published tasks, saving up to 60–80% traffic with significant bandwidth savings.

• Unified gradual rollout strategy

Rich gradual rollout strategies: batch gradual rollout, proportional gradual rollout, smooth gradual rollout, scheduled release after gradual rollout, and more. Proportional gradual rollout addresses different product user scale differences.

Automated gradual rollout process: Gradual rollout batches flow automatically; gradual rollout runs unattended.

• Unified release process control

  • Full release lifecycle management: Standardized process (test, experience, approval, gradual rollout, full release, rollback, stop) provides complete release lifecycle management. Mechanisms at pre-release, during release, and post-release stages ensure release safety.

  • Independent process control: Supports pause, stop, and rollback for any product in aggregated release—unified multi-end control with maximum flexibility. When a specific product's release has issues, targeted damage control is possible.

3.4 Release Monitoring and Rollback Mechanisms​

Cross-platform development improves feature reuse and development efficiency but also brings longer logic chains. From a temporal dimension, chains include: download chain, load chain, and usage chain.

For example, when using the Hippy framework (similar to RN), steps include bundle startup download or pre-warm download, bundle decompression, Hippy engine initialization, bundle loading, JS loading and execution, page rendering, and more—each step may have performance issues and quality risks. Therefore, we need to upgrade our measurement indicator system to address new challenges from cross-platform release.

Full-chain release monitoring and rollback: Based on Tencent's Aegis frontend monitoring framework, Shiply developed monitoring SDKs for Hippy and Kuikly cross-platform frameworks. Through SDK integration with the Bugly monitoring platform, full-chain monitoring, alerting, and rollback for both cross-platform artifacts is achieved.

• Download chain: Supports monitoring of configuration pull success rate, package download coverage, and load success rate

• Load chain: Supports page load time, second-open rate metrics, and drill-down analysis of detailed metrics.

• Execution chain (runtime): Supports error logs, network request error codes and latency, various custom reports

• Native core metrics: Supports monitoring, alerting, and rollback for Crash, ANR, FOOM, ERROR, privacy compliance, and custom business metrics

3.5 Cross-Platform Release Support Status​

Shiply currently supports cross-platform aggregated release for H5, Hippy, and React Native framework artifacts, and also supports Flutter, Kuikly, and other framework dynamic SDK + release solutions:

• Flutter dynamic delivery: Supports hotfix and dynamic delivery at the Dart language layer in Flutter. Fully in-house solution focused on high performance and native development experience—performance and usability far exceed traditional JS and AST approaches.

• Kuikly dynamic delivery: Supports multi-end dynamic delivery on Android, iOS, Harmony, and more. On Android, uses native-like Dex loading mode—20% faster first screen vs SO mode. On iOS, achieves native-indistinguishable first screen and smoothness.

In June 2025, we surveyed usage of popular cross-platform frameworks Flutter and RN in the market:

• Flutter overall penetration is about 13%, highest in travel apps (29.5%).

• React Native overall penetration is about 9%, highest in travel products (18.2%).

Cross-platform framework penetration in apps still has significant room to grow. Shiply Pro (external service) will gradually open related capabilities to help industry apps better leverage cross-platform development and push features to market faster and more securely through dynamic release.

3.6 Cross-Platform Release Summary​

Shiply's cross-platform release solution systematically solves high-frequency release challenges in cross-platform, cross-app scenarios. It can coordinate complex cross-platform, cross-app release tasks simultaneously. Its core lies in a flexible release rules engine and powerful client-side SDK capabilities that solve inter-module dependency issues, support automatic downgrade, one-click rollback, and other key operations—completely breaking cross-platform release barriers. Only by achieving high-frequency dynamic release can cross-platform frameworks deliver maximum value.

IV. Dynamic Release: App Hotfix​

4.1 Hotfix Use Cases​

Facing sudden online issues, traditional fix processes are slow and costly. Shiply hotfix technology provides real-time response capability:

Emergency Bug Fixes

Login failures, startup crashes, payment blockers, and other core experience issues are no longer helpless situations.

Improve Online Fault Tolerance

Strict version quality control means heavy process constraints and significant test resource investment. Finding 5% of issues requires 80% effort in full regression testing. Losing flexibility and agility also means losing market timing. Hotfix improves online fault tolerance, appropriately reducing ineffective test investment and getting products to market faster.

Lightweight Version Rapid Upgrade

New features from development launch through version coverage to data collection often need long cycles to close the loop. App hotfix provides lightweight update capability—for small feature changes, rapid user-invisible upgrades are possible.

4.2 Shiply Hotfix SDK Solution​

Android hotfix solutions by fix granularity fall into three categories: function-level, class-level, and Dex-level.

Comparison of these approaches:

Overall, each approach has pros and cons in performance impact, compatibility, and usage limits.

Shiply Hotfix SDK uses a hybrid engine (Tinker, Redirect) combining multiple approaches. Based on massive business practice, it is deeply optimized for patch stability, compatibility, and activation speed. Businesses need not concern themselves with engine differences; optimal packaging can be flexibly chosen at release time.

Fix capability: Except for system-managed resources such as AndroidManifest.xml and RemoteView, supports dex, res, and so fixes for feature-level updates.

• Tinker engine: Supports Dex, SO library, and resource replacement (comprehensive), provides rollback capability (safety), active community (WeChat open source). Essentially application and optimization of Android class loading mechanism.

• Redirect engine: Function stubbing approach. Redirect does not use annotation-based diff marking but uses DexDiff to analyze differences and automatically extract fix code—lower usage barrier for developers and avoids annotation invalidation from compile-time inlining optimization. We also strengthened auto code generation (class inheritance and few other features cannot be supported at principle level), maximizing support for adding/removing variables, functions, classes, lambda, etc.—keeping stubbing modification limits minimal.

4.3 Shiply Hotfix End-to-End Management Solution​

Shiply app hotfix provides one-stop patch release management including: task management, branch management, pipeline plugins, gradual rollout management, approval and rollout, gradual rollout, real-time data statistics, and release quality monitoring integration.

Shiply ensures fast, secure, stable release through standard release processes and supporting tools, connecting multiple systems involved in release to make release simpler and more reliable.

4.4 Shiply Hotfix Implementation Results​

Shiply has provided capability support for 30+ apps within the company, covering peak devices exceeding 1 billion/day, with patch load success rate up to 99.9%+. Over the past year, Shiply hotfix capability significantly improved stability and user experience in core scenarios for multiple company products:

• Core module stability and performance optimization: Quickly fixed crashes and stutters in Business A files, photo albums, local documents, preloading, and cold start.

• Critical user experience fixes: Ensured Business B screen casting experience, core pages (such as Olympics carousel) UI consistency, and process stutters.

• Business-critical flow assurance: Resolved Business C ad and splash screen loading, live room core features, and underlying page navigation anomalies.

• Basic functionality and compatibility adaptation: Hotfix and compatibility adaptation for Business D kernel engine, skins, mall, push, voice, and other high-frequency modules.

V. Conclusion: Evolution Hidden, Value Maximized​

In today's intensely competitive app market, product competitiveness is "evolution speed × iteration cost × user experience"—dynamic release capability has become one of the core engines of rapid app evolution. Shiply is committed to hiding the complexity of technical iteration behind the scenes. Through full-scenario, one-stop release capabilities, it helps developers create the ultimate smooth experience of seamless feature upgrades and invisible issue fixes for users—when technical iteration is invisible, product value shines brightest.

In the past six months, Shiply has also begun offering commercial services externally. With high-reliability, large-scale validated technical solutions, it has landed in consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare, e-commerce, content, social, and other industries—continuously providing high-quality dynamic release services, cross-end dynamic frameworks, app hotfix, and other capability support.

Welcome to visit Tencent Shiply to start a free trial and embrace a new paradigm of app release!

Or contact a Shiply Account Manager for consultation. You can also visit TDS Tencent Device Services for more product information and solutions.