1. Status quo mobile releases are a massive time sink that's draining your ROI.
Our survey reveals mobile teams lose significant time to non-productive release tasks, with most engineers spending nearly a third of their total release cycle on low-value activities. This productivity drain directly impacts engineering morale and shipping velocity, yet has become so normalized that most teams rate their processes as "somewhat efficient" despite clear evidence to the contrary. This is the release equivalent of the frog in slowly boiling water—teams have acclimated to inefficiency.
2. Simply shipping more doesn’t mean your release process is more efficient.
Teams releasing biweekly or more frequently saw more busywork and wasted time than those on monthly cycles. In fact, nearly half of frequent releases wasted 6-10 hours per release cycle on non-product tasks (Figure 3). This counterintuitive finding reveals a brutal truth: as market pressures push teams to ship faster, coordination overhead growsburdens grow exponentially without proper tooling infrastructure, creating a ceiling on how quickly teams can effectively iterate. This phenomenon hits large organizations especially hard, where release processes become increasingly complex (Figure 6).
3. Everyone accepts hotfixes as normal. They shouldn't be.
Over three-quarters of mobile teams experience incidents requiring hotfixes approximately every fourth release (Figure 5), creating a predictable disruption cycle that diverts resources from feature development to firefighting. This normalized failure rate represents a significant business risk as mobile becomes the primary customer channel. It's also a key contributor to release anxiety and engineer burnout. The fact that only 17% of respondents believe inefficiencies in their current release process would lead to missed deadlines, delayed features or negative user impact (Figure 7) reveals a striking disconnect between perceived and actual efficiency—teams have accepted a broken status quo.
4. Throwing new tooling & automation at the problem isn't fixing your releases (or cutting busywork).
Paradoxically, teams with significant automation investments actually report less efficient release processes than those with moderately-automated approaches (Figure 10), highlighting that point solutions often increase complexity without addressing the core challenge. This reveals why status quo approaches fall short: they tackle individual tasks without unifying the entire release workflow, leaving engineers to bridge gaps manually between fragmented toolchains and deal with coordination challenges.
5. Teams know they need better coordination but don't know the tools to fix it.
Two-thirds of respondents believe improved release coordination would deliver moderate to significant benefits and could prevent a majority of release incidents (Figure 12). This widespread recognition of the problem contrasts with continued reliance on general-purpose tools ill-suited for the unique challenges of mobile releases, suggesting teams haven't found comprehensive solutions that truly integrate their release workflow.
To gain deeper insights into the current state of mobile release processes, we commissioned a survey of 300 mobile engineers to shed light on real-world practices.
This report was administered online by an independent research firm and captures responses from senior mobile engineers in retail, e-commerce, fintech and health industries who are actively involved in their mobile release processes. Respondents were sourcedcame from companies across the US and UK with 500-10,000 employees, at least 10 people on their mobile engineering team, significant business driven by mobile apps, and minimum monthly update cadences at a minimum.
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Respondents were recruited through a global B2B research panel and invited via email to complete the survey, with all responses collected during Jan-Feb 2025. The answers to most non-numerical questions were randomized to prevent order bias.
For mobile-first businesses, apps aren't just another channel—they're the lifeblood of revenue generation and customer engagement. Mobile apps are now key to business success. They drive sales and shape customer relationships, but in turn putting more pressure on mobile engineering teams. When a release goes sideways, the entire business feels the pain.
It begins with frustrating busywork for individuals. Then, it grows into team-wide resource issues and loss of trust from missed deadlines. Finally, it manifests as lower competitiveness and revenue for the organization.
Despite the risk to the business of poor release management, quantifying the impact has historically been somewhathistorically difficult. The status quo of release management often just considers the downsides of the release process as the cost of doing mobile business, which is forgotten once features are out the door.
As the saying goes, “what gets measured gets managed.” Without clear data showing how today’s release management affects teams, we can't expect to solve the common problems with the status quo. Which is why we set out to create the first State of Mobile Release Management Report.
Here's what this report uncovers:
The complexities of mobile releases stem from team silos, innate platform differences, patchwork tooling solutions, and “work about work” that creates a major cognitive burden with every release cycle. On top of these stressors, mobile engineers often face pressure from product and leadership teams who don't fully grok the inherent complexities of mobile releases. As organizations scale, these challenges get worse in turn. Many mobile engineers now face each release with resignation and dread—a sentiment that's become alarmingly common. DevEx has, therefore, emerged as a critical priority, especially in a market where engineering talent is stretched thin and burnout risks are real.
Naturally, companies have tried to automate their way out of this mess. However, our research confirms an "automation paradox". When we think about efficiency—minimizing manual work, improving coordination, avoiding context switching, and managing incidents effectively—throwing more automation at the problem doesn’t really fix things. The human element of mobile releases—cross-team coordination and connecting siloed data sources—is the key bottleneck that automation alone can’t addressfix. Even teams with sophisticated automation and mature releases still struggle with the fundamentally human aspects of releases.
We conducted this survey to elevate mobile release management as a first-class concern for engineering teams. This report offers a new way to quantify the cost of the status quo release playbook and provides mobile teams a way to compare their reality to industry standards. Our goal with this survey is to surface data to help mobile teams make a clear case for improving their release processes and upgrading better release tools.
The survey shows what's important at every level: From individual developer experience, to team efficiency, to organizational impact, to business outcomes. It's a must-read for anyone in mobile release management, whether you're directly working on releases or making strategic choices about mobile engineering resources.
