The Challenge:

Tinder’s mobile engineering teams were scaling fast — but their test infrastructure wasn’t keeping up.

By 2022, Tinder was running over 1,400 Android Espresso tests and 1,300 iOS UI and analytics tests daily. Yet:

   -   Android testing was bottlenecked by unstable AWS Genymotion emulators, poor test sharding, and long queue times.

   -   iOS testing relied on 16 AWS Mac EC2 instances, plagued by flakiness, timeouts, and painful manual maintenance.

   -   DevOps was spending more time maintaining infrastructure than supporting growth, draining productivity from both QA and development teams.

As test queues grew and cycles stretched into hours, velocity dropped — and product delivery was directly impacted.

The Marathon Labs Solution:

Tinder partnered with Marathon Labs to fully replace their AWS-based infrastructure and bring high-scale, high-speed automation to both Android and iOS.

⚡ Instant Onboarding, Minimal Effort

Within 2–3 minutes, Tinder engineers had tests running on Marathon Cloud — no complex setup, configuration, or infrastructure provisioning required.

🎯 Free 2-Week Proof of Concept (POC)

Marathon offered a free POC to fine-tune large-scale test execution, optimize sharding, and validate stability. This no-risk approach helped Tinder confidently commit to the migration — with proven results before paying a dollar.

Android: From Friction to Flow

   -   Replaced 30 AWS Genymotion emulators with Marathon’s virtualized Android infrastructure

   -   Ran thousands of tests in parallel with intelligent sharding

   -   Removed platform instability, flakiness, and long queues

   -   Engineers got test feedback in minutes, not hours
 

✅ Result: Full Android test suite per PR completed under 20 minutes — without DevOps intervention.

iOS: From Chaos to Confidence

Marathon replaced Tinder’s flaky Mac EC2 nodes with cloud-native iOS infrastructure:

   -   Test cycle times dropped from 3 hours to under 20 minutes

   -   Stability improved from 80% to 98%

   -   DevOps no longer needed to manually update Mac instances after every Apple release
 

QA gained built-in observability and reporting, with real-time insights into test flake and performance

Why Marathon over AWS, BrowserStack, or LambdaTest?

Results That Mattered

   -   ⏱️ Test cycles reduced from 3 hours to under 20 minutes

   -   📈 iOS test stability jumped from ~80% to 98%

   -   🧹 Reduced flakiness and pipeline instability

   -   🛠️ Freed up 10+ hours/week from DevOps and automation teams

   -   💰 Infrastructure costs cut by up to 60%

   -   🔁 Enabled reliable bi-weekly mobile releases across Android & iOS

Business Impact

   -   📦 Faster, more reliable mobile releases

   -   💡 Greater developer confidence and focus

   -   🧪 QA team freed from firefighting, focused on quality

   -   📉 Reduced cost and complexity of test infrastructure

   -   🤝 A scalable platform built for growth

Takeaway

Tinder’s shift to Marathon Labs wasn’t just a tooling upgrade — it was a strategic decision to eliminate infrastructure friction, cut test times, and empower their QA and engineering teams to move faster with confidence.

If you're still relying on AWS-based setups or legacy vendors like BrowserStack or LambdaTest — it might be time for a change.

👉 Ready to transform your mobile testing pipeline?