Solo, shipping a small paid app. Today's Android build sat in the queue for 52 minutes before it started. That was the third build of the day because I was chasing a signing config problem, so the day mostly consisted of waiting.
I have a reasonable laptop and a spare mini sitting on a shelf. Is the paid tier worth it at this volume or should I just build locally and stop thinking about queues?
Third option nobody lists: build in your existing CI. The Expo action handles most of the setup, Android fits comfortably in a free runner, and you get build logs alongside your other CI logs. iOS needs a macOS runner and those minutes are expensive enough that the arithmetic often flips back.
Before you buy or configure anything, cut the number of builds.
Most people trigger a full native build for a JS-only change out of habit. If nothing native changed - no new dependency with native code, no config plugin edit, no permission - you want an update, which is seconds. Once you are disciplined about that, the queue stops being a daily problem and starts being a weekly one.
This is the actual answer. I went from about 12 builds a week to 3 purely by being honest about what needed a binary, and I stopped caring about queue times entirely.
Queue time is the same on every tier, you are only paying for concurrency. If you are one person building one thing at a time, the paid plan does nothing for you.
Priority in the queue is the main thing the paid tiers buy, and it is very noticeable when the free queue is busy. Concurrency matters when a team pushes at once, which at one person is indeed irrelevant - but that is the part that does not apply, not the part that does.
Whatever you pick, put it behind one script in the repo so "how do I build this" is written down rather than remembered. Future you at 11pm on a release day is effectively a different, worse developer.
Signing config specifically is worth solving once and never touching. Get the credentials managed remotely, verify a build, and then stop having opinions about keystores.
@stack_trace_sy · 2w ago · 3 replies
Entirely depends on how often you are blocked on it, which is a different question from how often you build.
Three builds a week and none of them urgent: local is fine and free. Android especially, since you do not need particular hardware for it. Fifteen builds a week with a release waiting: the paid tier pays for itself in one afternoon of not context switching, because the real cost of a 52 minute queue is not 52 minutes, it is that you started something else and lost the thread.
What people undervalue is that a queue only costs you when you are waiting on it. Most builds are not that. Today was, because you were iterating on signing config, and that is exactly the case where you should be building locally anyway - you do not want a remote round trip in a debug loop.
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@treadmill_tara · 2w ago
Local builds also mean you own toolchain drift. That is completely fine until the day it is not, and then you are debugging an NDK version mismatch at 11pm instead of shipping the thing you were shipping.
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@rawfileruth · 2w ago
For iOS specifically, local means a Mac with the right Xcode for your SDK. If you are on Linux that removes the option entirely, so the answer differs per platform rather than per person.
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