I can break my game for 1,000 people
Hey Galactic Dev - Simon here 👋
Tiny Harvest has around 1,000 active players now.
That sounds nice, until you realize what it means: every update I ship is a chance to break the game for all of them at once.
And when that happens, the annoying part is this:
Fixing the bug takes two minutes. Getting that fix onto someone’s phone can take much longer.
New build, upload, submit, wait for review, hope people update.
But for a lot of changes, I can skip that process completely. One question decides it: did the native app change?
- Yes → new build, TestFlight, store review
- No → an OTA update might be all I need
This week’s video walks through the whole pipeline I use to ship Tiny Harvest - from changing a line of code on my Mac to that change running on a player’s phone:
👉 How I Update My App for 1,000 Players Without the App Store
I also cover when I don't use OTA even though I could, and how I roll out updates without breaking 1,000 people at once.
🐛 This video is sponsored by Codemagic
To push an OTA update, you need somewhere to host and distribute it. In the video I show a demo of Codemagic Patch, a self-hosted way to ship OTA updates to your React Native app, and publish a real update with it from start to finish.
🌱 What’s new in Tiny Harvest this week
🏘️ Valley Town: Mini game, new buildings and townsfolk to meet.
🍣 New endgame for levels 101-200: 26 buildings, including a Sushi Bar.
🏔️ The Spire now climbs to floor 500, with new Celestial tier.
Tiny Harvest is my cozy farming game built with React Native - free on iOS and Android.
Play Tiny Harvest → https://tinyharvest.app/
See you next week!
Simon
