If your team ships a React Native app, you already know the build is the easy part. The friction shows up after the build — when everyone who isn't a mobile developer needs to actually look at it.
The PM wants to compare two versions of a flow. The designer wants to check layout across screen sizes. The backend engineer wants to confirm what the staging build actually does with their API change. And every one of them ends up at the same place:
"Can you install the build on your machine and show me?"
Because the simulator only runs on a developer's Mac, behind Xcode and Android Studio. So a mobile developer becomes a human deployment pipeline, interrupted a dozen times a day.
We built tapflow — an open-source, self-hosted tool that streams iOS simulators and Android emulators straight to the browser — to get rid of that interruption. This post is the whole picture, told from a React Native team's point of view.
