It’s more common than you think if you expand your view of release a bit. On the one hand you very much still have shrink-wrap software (for example, all firmware) that ships on a very slow cadence.
On the other hand even the big tech companies will only expose code paths very slowly and very conservatively. Meta’s Threads.app for example combined both a constant churn of innovation on master with a very measured gating of new features shipping to the public.
The best teams do indeed, as you say, ship and test finished builds on a weekly or daily basis even if the stuff that gets under the customers’ / users’ / clients’ noses appears on a far less regular basis. After all, any kind of severe bug could necessitate a release at any moment.
On the other hand even the big tech companies will only expose code paths very slowly and very conservatively. Meta’s Threads.app for example combined both a constant churn of innovation on master with a very measured gating of new features shipping to the public.
The best teams do indeed, as you say, ship and test finished builds on a weekly or daily basis even if the stuff that gets under the customers’ / users’ / clients’ noses appears on a far less regular basis. After all, any kind of severe bug could necessitate a release at any moment.