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If you are a React Native engineer, your job isn’t typically about maintaining infrastructure. So “self-hosted OTA” can sound like a trap. Even if your Expo Update bill is hitting six figures, it’s easy to assume that self-hosting isn’t worth the potentially huge time sink. That fear is understandable, but it doesn’t have to play out that way.

Self-hosting OTA updates became common after App Center and CodePush shut down in 2025. CodePush had been the popular free option, but the remaining hosted services easily hitting five or six figure bills for popular apps. For staging-only or use with small user bases, self-hosting is fairly straight forwards. But, as the user base grows, the architecture can start to struggle and bolt on pieces are required.

React Native OTA tools in 2026 split across two clients, Expo Updates and CodePush-style, and two ways of running them, hosted or self-hosted. The clients are not interchangeable. You still need the matching SDK.