---
title: How City Hive ships 1,000+ mobile apps
description: City Hive uses CircleCI as an execution engine to automate build, test,
  and store submission for 1,000+ branded mobile apps, reaching 60-70 releases a day.
url: https://circleci.com/case-studies/city-hive/
---

Most CI/CD conversations start with a single codebase, a single app, and a team trying to go faster. City Hive had a different problem.

The New York-based software company builds and manages 1,000+ branded mobile apps for alcohol retailers across the country. Every app has its own store identity. Every app needs to be built, tested, and submitted to Apple and Google on a rolling cycle. And every one of them needs to stay current, or the retailers depending on them fall behind.

Initially, City Hive utilized a legacy CI platform that capped out at single-instance parallelism and lacked management capabilities through an API. As their catalog grew, their pipeline depended on multiple manual steps which slowed down their app release cycle. Additionally, making catalog-wide changes such as an urgent bug fix or a SDK change were becoming a huge challenge. With hundreds of apps to cycle through, this ceiling wasn't a performance inconvenience, it was a fundamental constraint on the business. You can't run a rolling release operation across 1,000 apps if you can only move one at a time. 

# Finding an execution engine, not just a faster CI tool

City Hive realized that simply running a pipeline faster wouldn't solve a catalog-scale problem. They needed an execution engine: a platform they could drive programmatically, query in real time, and integrate into a fully automated release funnel.

Three capabilities drove the decision to move to CircleCI to establish a fully automated release machine: true multi-instance parallelism, a robust API that external tooling could drive, and reliable infrastructure, ensuring that the distinction between a real failure and a flaky one was meaningful.

Today, City Hive uses CircleCI across their full app catalog. Each pipeline handles three things: a native build for iOS and Android, end-to-end tests on emulators, and a submission push to both the Apple App Store and Google Play.

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# Execution at catalog scale

Today, City Hive runs CircleCI across their full app catalog. A rolling 50-day release cycle now covers 1,000+ apps seamlessly, with peak throughput hitting 60–70 app releases per day. A small engineering team now delivers at a scale most large teams never reach. 

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*[City Hive](https://www.cityhive.net/){: target="_blank"} is the omni-channel commerce and data platform for the beverage alcohol industry, serving 4,500+ licensed liquor stores. Founded in 2014, City Hive connects retailers, distributors, and suppliers on a single platform built for three-tier compliance, with e-commerce, mobile apps, marketing automation, and embedded B2B payments.*

*Ready to build your own execution engine? [Contact CircleCI](https://circleci.com/contact/) to learn how our platform can power fully automated release pipelines at any scale.*