65% of Mobile Teams Rank the Release Process as a Top Source of Team Frustration
65% of mobile engineering managers rank the release process among their team's top three sources of frustration. A
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65% of mobile engineering managers rank the release process among their team’s top three sources of frustration. A typical release takes 25 people to unblock.
SAN FRANCISCO , CA, UNITED STATES, September 10, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — 65% of mobile teams rank the release process as a top-three source of team frustration, according to Runway‘s 2026 State of Mobile Release Management survey of 300 mobile engineering managers.
The data points to org-wide coordination as the source of the pain. A typical mobile release pulls in around 25 people across the organization at 51% of companies surveyed, and about 40 people at another 25%. Those people expand well beyond the mobile team into design, QA, product, marketing and legal, turning each release into a cross-org logistics problem that lands on mobile engineering to manage. Meanwhile, status gets chased rather than seen: only 13% of teams can determine current release status from a single place, and, on average, 40% of release time goes to coordination work instead of meaningful build work that furthers the business. That overhead has a cost on both ends. 76% of EMs see at least a quarter of their releases deviate from the planned timeline, and the people absorbing the coordination work are the same people being burned out by that work later on.
Managers and engineers also read the pain differently, which matters for any EM trying to make the case for fixing it. 83% of EMs believe improving the release process would accelerate the product roadmap. But when Runway surveyed mobile engineers in 2025, 43% of them said inefficient releases were unlikely to cause missed deadlines. Both of those can be true at the same time. Release work lands on top of a sprint that’s already committed, so whoever picks it up ends up overallocated: 44% of managers say the engineer running a release gets through less than half their planned sprint work that cycle. Nobody cancels the feature work. It just takes longer, and the roadmap stretches a little further out every cycle.
Runway’s 2026 Decision Guide covers the frustration data as part of five decisions that define mobile release management, with analysis of how the numbers moved from 2025 to 2026 and a five-stage maturity curve an EM can use to see where their team sits against 300 peers.
The 2026 Decision Guide: Modern Mobile Release Management for Engineering Managers is available for free here.
About Runway
Runway is a mobile release management platform purpose-built by former mobile engineers who have lived through the pain of chaotic releases. By automating tedious tasks, unifying fragmented tools and enhancing visibility, Runway helps mobile teams save hours per release, reduce risk, and improve collaboration and app quality. Trusted by leading mobile teams at DoorDash, Skyscanner, SoFi, Kickstarter and Gusto, Runway makes releases transparent, repeatable and hands-free, so engineers can focus on building features instead of fighting fires.
Riley Maguire
Runway
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