>To me, in my open source projects, my "development cycle" ends when I push to git, and that can be done as often as I want.

If development ends at a git push and users are left to build/fend for themselves (granted this is a lot of open source), then yeah not much difference, but if you're building and packaging it up for users (which you will more likely to be doing if your project is an app specifically) then the difference is massive.