What a Production Channel Is

A production channel is the one channel in a project that is intended for real-user releases.

Bundle Drop uses this designation to distinguish short-lived testing channels from the channel that should keep release bundles valid longer.

Only one production channel can be set per project at a time.

Why Teams Use It

Production channels are useful when you want to:

• keep real-user release bundles from following the default short retention window
• separate internal testing tracks from the channel used for actual customer rollout
• make storage and retention behavior easier to reason about across a project's release pipeline

Without a production channel, bundles follow the default retention behavior and can expire automatically after 30 days.

How It Works

At a high level:

1. You open the project's Channels page in the dashboard.
2. You choose the channel that should represent your real-user release path.
3. You mark that channel as production and choose its retention policy.
4. From that point on, bundles uploaded or promoted into that channel follow the production retention policy instead of the default short-lived behavior.

This policy only applies to bundles added after the channel is marked as production. Existing bundles are not retroactively changed when you first enable it.

Available Production Retention Options

When marking a channel as production, Bundle Drop lets you choose how long production bundles should stay valid:

• 90 days
• 180 days
• never expires automatically

The never option is useful when you want full manual control, but it also means those bundles will remain in storage until you remove them yourself.

Shared Bundles and Promotion

Bundle promotion in Bundle Drop reuses the same underlying bundle across channels instead of creating a duplicate upload.

That means if a bundle is promoted into the production channel, the production retention policy applies to that shared bundle record.

This is intentional:

• the bundle still occupies storage only once
• the dashboard already shows when a bundle is available on multiple channels
• the production channel is the release track that should control whether that bundle stays valid longer

Unmarking a Production Channel

If you later remove the production designation from a channel, Bundle Drop warns you before applying the change.

When you confirm:

• production retention no longer applies to bundles that were using that channel's production policy
• those affected bundles are normalized back to the standard 30-day retention window from upload time
• older bundles may become expired immediately and will later be removed by cleanup

The dashboard previews affected bundles before you confirm, so teams can see the impact before changing the channel.

What the Client Needs to Know

Most app teams only need to remember this:

• a project can have only one production channel
• production retention is configured from the dashboard
• it applies to bundles uploaded or promoted after the channel is marked as production
• if no production channel is set, bundles follow the default 30-day retention behavior

Your app integration does not change. This is a dashboard-level release control.

Related Docs

• For release tracks in general, see Channels.
• For stricter release eligibility, see Managed Publishing.
• For gradual release control, see Staged Rollouts.
• For reverting a bad release, see Rollback.
• For publishing bundles, see Uploading.