Whether a new feature is being developed, stabilized, QA'd, or critiqued, it's often useful to to allow others to preview what it looks and feels like before it is released to production.
Traditionally previewing meant re-building the project and distributing it to a reviewer manually. Previewing features with EAS Update removes the need for rebuilding in most cases and can help us preview new features quicker.
A published update can be loaded in various environments:
A release build distributed via Google Play beta, TestFlight, or internal distribution with a matching runtime version and channel pointing to a branch with the published update. With this strategy, often an EAS Update channel like "alpha" or "beta" will be used, and builds and updates will be created from development branches in source control.
Expo Go can also load published updates in cases where custom native code is not used.