New Mobile Engineers Take Five Months to Run a Release Solo, New Data Finds
Runway's 2026 report, Modern Mobile Release Management for Engineering Managers, looks at how mobile teams staff, run, and scale their releases.
On average, new mobile engineers need five months before they can confidently run a release on their own.
44% of senior engineers who run releases finish less than half their planned sprint work during release cycles. Most teams still route releases through their most senior mobile engineers, which means the release load is eating product work at the most exp
Only 7% of mobile engineering managers are very confident any engineer on their team could run a release end-to-end. New hires need five months to get there.
The five-month ramp has a structural cause. A release runs through store review, staged rollouts, third-party tools and approval gates across teams that shift from cycle to cycle, and each of those steps lives somewhere different. There's no one place the release exists, so there's often no one place documenting it, and the knowledge ends up with whoever has run the most releases. At 47% of companies, that person is a senior mobile engineer, and the cost to those senior people is measurable: 44% of them complete less than half of their planned sprint work in a release cycle. Meanwhile, only 7% of EMs are very confident that any engineer on their team could run a release end to end, which leaves most teams without a reliable backup for the person who does.
For most teams, this tenuous situation gets harder to undo every cycle. Every well-executed release deposits a little more institutional memory in the same one or two people, so the gap between what they know and what anyone else knows widens each cycle. Unfortunately, hiring more or faster doesn't change it. The seniors carrying release work today don't get relief from a new hire for half a year. EMs see it clearly: 45% name knowledge concentration as a top concern for the next 12 to 18 months, and 46% name team sustainability and burnout. Both describe the same handful of people, and if one of them leaves, the release best practices go with them.
The fix is to move release knowledge out of a few heads and into one system the whole team can follow. Runway's 2026 Decision Guide treats release ownership as one of five decisions that define mobile release management, alongside where release status lives, how leadership perceives mobile risk, how AI-touched code ships and whether to invest in process or platform work, with a 15-item self-assessment EMs can use to score their team against the population average.
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
riley@runway.team
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