Staged Rollouts
What a Staged Rollout Is
A staged rollout lets you release a bundle gradually instead of sending it to everyone on a channel at once.
For example, you might start with 10%, watch for issues, then increase to 25%, 50%, and finally 100%.
For staged rollout to work on a channel, that channel must have Managed Publishing enabled. Managed publishing is the gate that makes rollout eligibility matter.
Why Teams Use It
Staged rollouts are useful when you want to:
- reduce risk on production channels
- test a release with a smaller audience first
- expand a rollout step by step while monitoring results
Even within a rollout, each device is still protected by automatic crash protection, which reverts an update that keeps failing on launch.
How It Works
At a high level:
- You upload a bundle to a channel.
- You enable Managed Publishing for that channel.
- In the dashboard, you start or update a staged rollout for that bundle.
- Bundle Drop gradually makes that bundle eligible for more installs on that same channel.
- When you are confident, you move the rollout to 100%.
The app does not need special code for this beyond normal Bundle Drop integration. The rollout is controlled from the dashboard.
In the dashboard, staged rollout is configured from a channel's Bundles page for the bundle you want to release.
How Devices Are Chosen
Each install is assigned to a stable bucket derived from its install ID. When you set a rollout to 25%, the same quarter of your installs is eligible — not a fresh random draw on every check.
Because the bucket is deterministic per install, cohorts are sticky as you ramp:
- moving from 10% to 25% to 100% only adds new installs to the rollout
- a device that already qualified stays in the rollout at every higher percentage
- you never reshuffle or pull an update back from devices that already received it
This makes staged rollouts safe to increase gradually: you are always expanding the audience, never churning it.
The bucket is derived from the install ID alone, so it is stable across every rollout in the project — the same low-bucket installs are consistently in the earliest slice of each rollout, rather than being re-drawn independently per release.
Related Controls
Staged rollout works with these related controls:
- Managed Publishing is required. Without it, staged rollout is not the mechanism deciding bundle eligibility on that channel.
- Targeted Rollout is optional. It adds an audience filter before the rollout percentage is applied.
What the Client Needs to Know
Most client teams only need to remember three things:
- staged rollout happens per channel
- managed publishing must be enabled for staged rollout to be effective
- targeted rollout is optional and only narrows the audience further
Related Docs
- For release tracks, see Channels.
- For channel-level eligibility control, see Managed Publishing.
- For audience targeting, see Targeted Rollout.
- For reverting a bad release, see Rollback.
- For publishing bundles, see Uploading.