When Tinder’s internal test infrastructure reached its limit, the QA team found themselves battling hours-long test runs, unstable emulator farms, and flaky test runners that no one wanted to maintain. The solution wasn’t more hardware — it was a strategic shift to a smarter cloud-native platform.

The Challenge:

Tinder’s testing environment was built on Genymotion Cloud, running 1200+ UI tests using a custom fork of the Android Test Orchestrator. But over time, maintaining that setup became a drain:

   -   Test runners broke after each Android release

   -   Emulator farms required manual restarts monthly

   -   Genymotion upgrades caused regressions, especially with Android 11–13

   -   Their core test tool (“Fork”) was unmaintained

Tinder ran some tests on physical Pixel 4 devices, but CI jobs were slow, brittle, and hard to scale. At one point, a full test suite ran overnight — taking 21 hours to complete.

By 2023, Tinder needed something stable, scalable, and fast — without engineering overhead.

The Marathon Labs Solution:

Tinder first evaluated Marathon Labs in 2022, but the platform wasn’t yet mature enough for their needs. By mid-2023, they gave it another try — and found that Marathon’s team had solved the early problems:

   -   Android 13 support was solid

   -   Execution was stable across Android 10–15

   -   Slack support closed feedback loops fast

   -   CI integration was seamless

The team migrated their full UI test suite to Marathon Cloud.

Now, all 1200+ tests run in just 17 minutes, using pre-instrumented builds triggered automatically from CI. Marathon’s grid launches and executes tests without the manual fleet juggling Genymotion required.

The Results:

Tinder's mobile QA team now has a stable, scalable test pipeline that enables weekly releases with confidence.

   -   Test execution time dropped from 21 hours to 17 minutes

   -   Weekly full-platform test runs across Android 10–15

   -   No more manual emulator maintenance or patching

Replaced unmaintained “Fork” runner with a scalable solution

Business Impact:

   -   Releases are faster, with less firefighting

   -   QA and DevOps saved significant engineering time

   -   PR-level testing coverage improved with smoke tests per commit

   -   Developer confidence improved with consistent CI feedback

Takeaway:

Tinder’s decision to re-evaluate Marathon Labs paid off — not just in speed, but in operational sanity. The switch eliminated hours of maintenance work, reduced test suite execution from nearly a day to under 20 minutes, and enabled platform-wide testing at scale.

This case shows what happens when cloud-native testing isn’t just faster — it’s smarter, more stable, and aligned with modern engineering needs.

Want to test your stack against the best?

Run a side-by-side performance comparison — and we’ll handle the setup.