CodePush
Also called Microsoft CodePush, App Center
- Part of
- React Native Glossary
- Mentioned in
- Over-the-Air Update
- Updated
What is CodePush in React Native?
CodePush was Microsoft’s over-the-air update service for React Native, part of App Center, pushing new JavaScript to installed apps until its retirement in March 2025.
CodePush was the service that made over-the-air updates mainstream in React Native. Developers released a new JavaScript bundle with a CLI command, and the react-native-code-push library inside the app downloaded it and applied it on the next restart or immediately. It ran as part of Microsoft’s App Center, which was retired on 31 March 2025, taking the hosted CodePush service with it.
Its vocabulary still shows up in older codebases and job descriptions:
- Deployments such as Staging and Production, each with its own key baked into the binary.
- Target binary version: the store version an update was compatible with, the same idea Expo calls a runtime version.
- Mandatory updates, rollout percentages, and automatic rollback if an update crashed before signalling success.
codePush.sync(), the call that checked for, downloaded and installed an update.
Why it still matters: apps released before the shutdown may still contain the SDK, calling a service that no longer answers. Nothing visibly breaks, but those apps can no longer receive hotfixes, which a team usually discovers on the day it urgently needs one. If you inherit such an app, plan the migration before the next incident.
The common replacements:
- EAS Update, Expo’s hosted service, which works in bare React Native projects as well as Expo ones.
- Self-hosting a CodePush-compatible server, including the server code Microsoft published as open source ahead of the retirement, or one of several third-party services built to accept existing CodePush clients.
Whichever you choose, switching requires a new store build, because the update client lives in native code. Users stay on the old client until they install it.