Mobile apps have become vital to business success. They’ve evolved from supporting players to the main stage, driving more and more of companies’ bottom lines and serving as the primary interface between users and brands.
As mobile’s importance continues to grow, mobile teams feel increasing pressure to move fast and ship high-quality features. Yet, underlying all this success is a critical foundation that’s often overlooked: mobile release management. In many organizations, the process of getting apps into users’ hands is under strain—slower, noisier, and more fragmented than it should be.
In conversations with hundreds of mobile teams, we’ve consistently found that most are in some degree of release chaos. They’re stuck in manual busywork, coordination overhead, and managing mounting release anxiety while upper management pushes for ever-faster shipping.
Recognizing how widespread and consequential these issues are, we commissioned independent researchers to survey over 300 senior mobile engineers in the US and UK about their teams' release management practices. The findings were both validating and surprising, and new data points quantify what we had seen anecdotally.
Through our analysis, five key stories emerged, providing a comprehensive view of the current state of mobile release management and its impact on both engineering teams and the wider organization.
Finding #1: Mobile releases are a massive, hidden time sink
Mobile engineers dedicate 32.5% of each release cycle to manual tasks, administrative busywork, and other necessary evils that don’t directly contribute to user value.
This inefficiency costs an average of five hours per release for teams on a biweekly cadence. Over the course of a year, teams lose 130 valuable hours to this productivity drain—equivalent to three full work weeks that could have been spent building instead of shipping.
Even more alarming is that more than half (51%) of the surveyed teams rate their own release management processes as "somewhat efficient." This reflects a form of collective resignation: Teams have grown so accustomed to release chaos that they've stopped recognizing its extent and impact. They view wasted time simply as a cost of doing business, rather than an opportunity to ship more value.
Yet, the loss is real. Nearly 1/3 more engineering capacity per cycle could be redirected to high-impact work (building features) that actually moves the business forward.Â
Finding #2: Shipping faster (without the right tools) actually creates more process waste
As mobile teams face increasing pressure from leadership to ship faster, many are adopting (or at least striving for) more aggressive, faster release cadences.
Contrary to intuition, our research found that teams releasing biweekly or faster waste significantly more time than those on monthly cycles. Nearly half (44%) of frequent-release teams spend 6-10 hours per release on busywork, compared to just 30% of monthly teams.
This finding challenges the core assumption in our industry that more frequent releases automatically mean better processes. In reality, market pressure to ship faster without proper coordination and infrastructure (e.g. shipping faster just to ship faster) creates exponential complexity rather than compounding efficiency gains.
As organizations scale, this problem gets worse. For enterprise companies with 5,000+ employees, inefficient release processes become the #1 risk factor (34%), outranking budget constraints and resource limitations that dominate smaller companies' concerns.
There's a ceiling on how quickly teams can effectively iterate, and most hit it without realizing why. The answer isn't to slow down. Rather, it's to build better processes, communication, and infrastructure to handle the complexity of frequent releases.
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Finding #3: Everyone treats hotfixes as normal (they shouldn't be)
Mobile teams have normalized a broken status quo. 3/4 of mobile teams (77%) experience incidents requiring hotfixes every 3–5 releases, with 9% facing incidents every other release. This adds up to a total of 86% of teams regularly diverted from planned work to firefighting.Â
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However, instead of addressing this issue, many teams have adapted their schedules to accommodate a predictable amount of chaos and disruption. Incidents and hotfixes are no longer just emergency work; they've become part of the process, and teams accept slower or interrupted releases as the norm.
While this dysfunction is evident to some, most mobile teams can’t clearly see just how much better things could be. Even teams that recognize their high incident rates often struggle to see how their release management practices contribute to the issue.Â
A disconnect exists between observable problems and their underlying causes. While teams acknowledge these frequent incidents, only 17% believe their release inefficiencies would actually lead to missed deadlines or negative user impact.Â
Teams aren't connecting the dots between their broken processes and the business impact. This level of unpredictability directly impacts user trust, which, in turn, directly impacts the business’s bottom line.Â
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The data shows teams could prevent nearly 2/3 (63.1%) of incidents with better release coordination and process. This translates to real, measurable revenue gains.Â
Finding #4: The automation paradox—more tools don't equal better outcomes
Inadequate automation isn’t the source of mobile release management headaches. Rather, our research shows most teams have invested significantly in automation, yet continue to struggle with release inefficiency.
Among the 51% of teams that have implemented significant release automation, a disproportionate number still waste 6–10 hours per release on non-productive tasks. Furthermore, a staggering 75% of all surveyed teams regularly invest in automation and scripting for their release processes, yet these same teams report persistent challenges with wasted time, incident rates, and general unpredictability around releases.
This reveals an automation paradox for today’s mobile teams. Most teams have reached a tipping point where their automation tools (CI/CD pipelines, build scripting, etc.) are well-optimized, but adding this tooling has increased complexity and resulted in diminishing returns (and exacerbation of existing problems). Overinvestment in automation leads to fragmented, specialized tooling and custom scripts and solutions that might address specific pain points ultimately add more overhead in terms of maintenance and human coordination.
Teams can't simply script their way out of the human element inherent in release management. The root cause of many issues is the coordination overhead that arises when the team needs to do something unusual, deviating from the well-trodden and automated path of a textbook release. In these situations, automation alone offers no support, and the team suffers under the illusion of a false safety net.
Finding #5: Teams recognize the coordination problem, but lack purpose-built solutions
Mobile teams see the potential benefits of improved coordination around releases. According to surveyed engineers, 2/3 of teams believe their organizations would see moderate to significant gains from more focus in this area.
However, despite seeing the promise of better release management, teams lack a clear roadmap of how to achieve it and the solutions most commonly employed to tackle release management challenges fall short of the mark. In fact, 82% of teams rely on general-purpose project management tools, such as Jira and Asana, to manage release coordination.
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This mismatch reveals the core issue: Teams are stuck using communication and project management tools that weren't designed for the unique complexity of mobile releases. The result is the thousand-tabs problem every mobile engineer knows—jumping between Slack, Jira, CI/CD dashboards, App Store Connect, and spreadsheets just to understand what's happening with a single release.
To make matters worse, some organizations pull valuable engineering resources off high-impact product work to build and maintain bespoke in-house release tooling, as is the case for 30% of our respondents. Often, these custom tools eventually fall by the wayside as internal champions move on, leaving teams stuck with poorly maintained legacy systems.
What the data means for your mobile team
The status quo surrounding mobile release management costs organizations significant time, resources, and talent. It's normal, almost inevitable, when things get messy at scale, but teams and leadership often underestimate its hidden costs. Beyond process inefficiency itself, it creates ripple effects that eat into engineering capacity, roadmaps, and morale.
By tackling these coordination challenges head-on, mobile teams can not only reclaim wasted time but also improve product quality, decrease burnout and increase developer happiness, and create competitive advantage through operational excellence. While the importance of mobile release management has often been overlooked or trivialized, it’s now becoming a true differentiator.
Our full report delves deeper into these findings with additional data, insights, and recommendations for improving your team’s release processes.
Ready to see how your team stacks up? Download the full 2025 State of Mobile Release Management Report to benchmark your current practices and uncover concrete steps to alleviate your team’s release headaches for good.
