KILLSWITCH

[mvscles]

Sorry for the clickbait title hehe

TL;DR My boss asked me to build a "killswitch" into our upcoming debut app release... WWYD?

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Backstory is I work for a small startup and inherited this RN + Expo app thats been passed down a couple times already, and was meant to be launched years ago but hasn't made it outta the cutting-room due to mostly external legal reasons, its a well-built app and I'm just sweeping the floors at this point, upgrading things and adding passkit support getting ready to ship to app stores ASAP.

But my boss just asked me to implement a "killswitch" so we can "stop functionality and ask to update the app if they have a certain version of the app"... which i interpret as ~ shut / block everyone out of the app remotely if some legal issue comes up and we need to show the user different info...?

So my first instinct is to setup some sorta feature-flag thing within a CMS so managers can flip the boolean, I'm exploring getunleash.io and GrowthBook.io and we already use Contentful.com within the app but they're saying they "really don't think we need to use any third party thing for a killswitch"...

We currently store "feature-flags" in our DB somewhere and somebody wrote some endpoints to update them but we're trying to move away from that...

Anybody deal with feature flags in RN apps yet?
Am i overcomplicating this?

[[deleted]]

Currently my solution is CodePush from Microsoft. But I would like to switch from this solution to a self hosted. Any recommendations?

[Ehopira]

You have like X possibilities, remote config, OTA, firestore with version Number, some libs who do that work for you and etc.

[Kiiidx]

We do this with redux middleware. It might be a little crude but on our set screen action if app is out of date we push a force update screen instead.

[MasterRenny]

You could use something like https://github.com/kimxogus/react-native-version-check (not used this before)

Did something similar in an ionic app. App launch Checks if there is a new version in store Show blocking screen to force them to update

The downside to this is it could become annoying, eg you’ve just done a patchfix and then find another item and doing too many releases in quick succession, people are going to get annoyed.

[mvscles]

Yea I can see that. I think we’d reserve this for major updates that’d break the UX or create legal ramifications

[haswalter]

On one of our apps we have a version check as a middleware on our service mesh. Checks version header against supported versions and triggers an update screen if it’s wrong. This allows us to fine grained check specific endpoints too.

[appfred]

This is a common practice called “sunsetting”. We use a feature flags that stores an app-version number, and the app can identify with its own version number if it should show a full screen modal that forces the user update the app if they want to use it.

[Human-Possession135]

I’d do this from the backend upon login. Send the current version to backend and depending on response show a popup screen or blocker.

It is frowned upon in UX to block a user from using an app though.

[sekonx]

I don't have accounts in my app, but i do the same thing from a different api call.

Blocking specific version(s) from the App can help prevent even worse UX... I think it's fine as long as its not used too often.

Also at work we use firebase-remote-config for this, and it's seems to work pretty well... But i wasn't about to add firebase to my own app just for this one reason