One Missing Environment Variable Crashed My App in Production (and I Lost My Play Store Testing Streak the Same Night)
#BuildInPublic for the RevenueCat Shipaton 2026 . RentDera is my entry, and I'm sharing the whole messy journey in public — wins, crashes, and gut-punches like the one below. This post is part of that trail. The setup Today I shipped v1.1.0 of RentDera, my rent-management app for landlords built with Expo + React Native . It was a big release: Edit properties, units, and tenants after creation…
On January 13, 2026, RentDera developer RentDera shared a post detailing a production crash that occurred after the release of version 1.1.0 of their rent-management app built with Expo and React Native. The crash was caused by a single missing environment variable - EXPO_PUBLIC_LEGAL_BASE_URL. In development, the variable was defined in the local .env file, but it was missing in the published build, causing the app to crash on launch.
The developer had implemented a validation system using Zod, which threw an error when a variable was missing, but the issue lay in their CI/release pipeline where the variable was never injected. They rebuilt and republished the app at 6 PM to rectify the issue. Later that night, they learned that one of their testers had opted out of the closed testing program, causing their testing streak to reset.
This loss was more distressing than the app crash, as Google requires 12 testers to be active for 14 consecutive days to publish to the Play Store. The developer emphasized the importance of validating environment variables and ensuring that the CI/EAS build supplies every variable. They also recommended smoke-testing the production/release build before shipping.
RentDera encouraged readers to help test their rent-tracking app and asked for support in finding 12 testers to maintain their streak.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
