Tell about your experience with Release Candidate (RC), how have you applied this approach in your projects?

Used Release Candidate as the final stage of testing before release in the App Store.

The process usually included:

1. Building RC based on the release branch or main after stabilization.
2. Uploading the build to TestFlight for internal and/or external testers.
3. Thorough testing on various devices and iOS versions.
4. Fixing only critical bugs blocking the release. Minor improvements and non-critical bugs were deferred to subsequent versions.
5. If critical bugs were found: creating a patch branch from RC, fixing, creating a new RC build, and repeating steps 1-4.
6. If RC passes testing successfully and contains no critical bugs: releasing the same build to the App Store.

Using RC minimized the risk of releasing an unstable version, as the build used for testing was identical to the one delivered to end users. This increased confidence in the release quality.