Tinder’s mobile test automation was slowing down fast-moving releases. With Android test infrastructure crumbling and iOS testing bogged down by unreliable Mac nodes, developer velocity hit a wall. Tinder turned to Marathon Labs to rebuild their mobile QA pipeline — and in doing so, unlocked faster, more stable releases across both platforms.

The Challenge:

Tinder’s engineering team ran 100s of mobile UI automated tests every day. But by 2022 when numbers were over 1000, both their Android and iOS testing infrastructure were at a breaking point.

On Android team 1400 Espresso tests were running  on AWS 30 genymotion emulators that were split into 2 nodes, but platform instability, test flakiness, and long test execution left developers waiting hours for results. Genymotion was also difficult to share effectively, meaning large test suites often got stuck in queue — compounding delays.

On iOS, Tinder was running over 1,300 UI and analytics tests using 16 AWS Mac EC2 instances. These nodes frequently failed, ran tests inconsistently, and required intensive maintenance. Test runs stretched to 3 hours, with parallelization causing flaky results and infrastructure timeouts.

Both platforms were holding back the QA and Dev teams — and the product roadmap was affected drastically.

The Marathon Labs Solution:

Tinder partnered with Marathon Labs to replace their AWS cloud infrastructure and help the Mobile Dev/QA team run every test suite — across each PR — in under 20 minutes.

Onboarding was fast. In just 2–3 minutes, Tinder’s team had tests running on Marathon Cloud. Marathon also offered a free 2-week proof of concept (POC) to help fine-tune test configuration and ensure effective test sharding at scale.

For Android, Marathon provided virtualized test execution that ran reliably in parallel — delivering results in minutes. Tinder fully migrated from AWS Genymotion to Marathon’s cloud environment, eliminating the delays and flake they’d faced with their previous setup.

Post-migration, the benefits were immediate: not only were tests dramatically faster, but DevOps regained at least 10 hours per week, no longer needed to support complex AWS infrastructure.

For iOS, the impact was even greater. Marathon replaced the fragile AWS Mac EC2 instance setup with scalable, cloud-native infrastructure. Test cycles dropped from 3 hours to under 20 minutes, and Tinder cut iOS testing costs by 60%.

Previously, DevOps had to manually update every Mac instance whenever Apple released a new version — a tedious and disruptive task. These instances were also shared with the broader iOS engineering team for builds, linters, and unit tests, creating a major bottleneck for over 50 iOS engineers.

Unlike other providers, Marathon only charges when tests are running — with no hidden fees during idle times. That efficiency, combined with smart infrastructure scaling, helped reduce Tinder’s overall testing infrastructure cost by 40%.

Results That Mattered:

   -   Test runs reduced from 3 hours to 15–20 minutes

   -   1,300+ iOS tests stability went from ~80% to 98%

   -   Reduced test flakiness and pipeline instability

   -   Improved test observability and reporting

   -   Freed up DevOPS and Test Automation team from infrastructure maintenance by giving them back hours that could be spent on other important tasks

Business Impact:

   -   Faster, more reliable mobile releases

   -   Greater developer confidence and productivity

   -   Eliminated infrastructure bottlenecks

   -   QA team focused on quality, not firefighting

   -   Reduced cloud infrastructure costs

   -   Eliminated DevOPS support 

Takeaway:

Tinder’s testing overhaul with Marathon Labs allowed them to replace unstable infrastructure with a scalable Marathon Cloud environment — accelerating test cycles, cutting instability, and allowing the QA team to focus on what matters: quality. With Marathon, Tinder now ships confidently across Android and iOS on bi-weekly basis.

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