A small engineering team uses CircleCI as an execution engine to fully automate building, testing, and releasing 1,000+ branded mobile apps for alcohol retailers
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.
“Rather than thinking of it as an engine that runs your tests and then deploys, how do you actually incorporate a whole funnel to it: it's an execution engine.”
Yosi Dediashvili-Drossos | Co-founder and CTO at City Hive
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.
“We manage north of 1,000 mobile apps; with CircleCI we were able to fully automate the update and launch processes for all of them, both for iOS and Android.”
Yosi Dediashvili-Drossos | Co-founder and CTO at City Hive
City Hive 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 to learn how our platform can power fully automated release pipelines at any scale.
