Picture the scene. You're sitting in yet another budget meeting, and someone inevitably pipes up with the golden question: "Why are we paying for seven different tools when we could just use one?" Everyone applauds. Confetti bursts from the ceiling. There’s a cake for some reason.
That’s the siren song of vendor consolidation. It's everywhere these days, and honestly? It makes sense. Finance loves it because it’s cost savings that can be easily represented as a budget line item. IT loves it because there's less to manage. Leadership loves it because it sounds efficient and streamlined and lean.
So naturally, when it comes to CI/CD, the conversation often goes something like this: "We're already using GitHub Actions for web and backend, so it probably works fine for everything else too? Including mobile. Problem solved!"
So, here's where I'm going to be the person who raises their hand with the uncomfortable question: Is cramming every critical function into a single tool really a strategic win? Especially when we're talking about something as specialized—and business-critical—as mobile development?
Mobile development: a beautiful, complex beast
At this point, anyone who still thinks mobile development is just “web, but smaller screens” hasn’t been paying attention. But unless you’re spending time on the ground with your mobile teams, you probably don’t have a full understanding of how distinctly complex shipping for mobile can be.
First, there's the massive infrastructure lift. Most organizations severely underestimate the cost of setting up and maintaining the hardware and virtual environments required to run their iOS and Android builds. Infrastructure for macOS is its own special migraine, with premium price-tags on hardware, strict virtualization limits, and special licensing considerations. Android is a bit easier, but not exactly straightforward, with fiddly custom environments, resource-hungry emulators, and complex device testing requirements.
Second, the mobile stack moves fast. Apple and Google regularly drop breaking changes, forcing your team to down tools and rejig their build pipeline just to keep the show on the road. And when builds are slow, or tests are flaky? You’re flying blind. Is it a code issue? Infrastructure problem? Did you forget your weekly sacrifice to the mobile gods? Without proper visibility into your build pipeline, debugging becomes a game of costly guesswork.
Now scale that up. Got multiple teams? Multiple apps? Welcome to the Squid Game of mobile infrastructure! Suddenly, your senior mobile developers—you know, the ones who are supposed to be shipping those unicorn-making features—are knee-deep in YAML configuration files for the rest of the week. Or worse, your generalist DevOps team is spending half their time searching "why did iOS build break" at the expense of every other part of their job. Suddenly, things don’t seem so lean or streamlined, and that’s before we even enter the labyrinth of release management and app store approval processes.
When you try to force mobile development through a general-purpose CI/CD tool, you end up with the digital equivalent of duct tape and prayers. Sure, it works (most of the time), but at what cost?
The fragmentation tax: When "good enough" gets expensive
Here's a scenario I see all too often: Company gets Bitrise for iOS (because, let's face it, iOS is a nightmare without a dedicated tool) but, in the name of "cost savings", decides to keep Android on GitHub Actions with web and backend. So now you've got the worst of both worlds—two platforms to manage, two sets of workflows to maintain, and two teams working on the same product but operating in parallel universes.
The iOS team is merrily shipping builds while the Android team is still debugging their custom Docker container. Meanwhile, the poor product manager is trying to pull together a coherent view of release status from three different half-finished dashboards and the world’s most confusing Slack channel.
This isn't consolidation—it's fragmentation. And fragmentation is expensive in ways that don't show up on your monthly SaaS bill. It shows up in delayed release cycles, frustrated engineers, and that persistent sense that shipping for mobile is only slightly more relaxing than the zombie apocalypse. It also, inevitably, shows up in your finished product: your Android users feel overlooked and neglected as your latest release has to be rolled back yet again, due to rushed testing or pesky environment inconsistencies that only surfaced after users started downloading the update.
Consolidate practices, not providers
What if I told you there's a different way to think about consolidation? What if, instead of stubbornly trying to cram mobile (or one half of mobile) into a tool designed for everything, you consolidated your entire mobile operation on a platform built specifically for it?
Enter Bitrise—the platform that actually gets mobile development.
Finally, a business case that’s not “fewer tools = better”
Speed matters a lot actually. When your mobile builds are running on infrastructure optimized for mobile workloads, with pre-configured virtual machines and smart build caching, you're not just saving minutes—you're saving hours, sometimes days, across your entire development cycle. And in mobile, getting to market fast isn't just a nice-to-have: it's your key competitive advantage.
The real cost of "cheap". If you’re already using a generalist CI tool for web and backend, using it for mobile as well might look “cheaper” on paper. But what does it cost if your mobile team spends, for example, 20% of their time maintaining custom scripts instead of building new features? When builds take twice as long because machines that handle web apps just fine simply don’t have the juice for mobile? When you're debugging environment issues instead of shipping again? Cheaper upfront doesn’t necessarily translate into ROI in the long-run.
Want to discover the true cost of generalist CI/CD for mobile? Try our Savings Calculator to get the hard numbers on time and money wasted.
Security that doesn't require a PhD. Mobile apps handle sensitive user data, payment information, and personal details. Bitrise's verified, first-party steps and native code signing capabilities mean you're not rolling the dice with community-contributed actions of questionable origin. Your security team will thank you, and your lawyers will sleep better.
Visibility > noise. Sure, you can probably to cobble together your own human-readable dashboards to pull in data from different tools (more dev time, more maintenance), but that’s not the same as getting unified insights into your entire mobile operation. Build performance, test results, release status—with Bitrise, you get them all in one place, in a visual format that literally anyone in the company can understand.
The collaboration bonus round
Here's something interesting: when both your iOS and Android teams are on the same platform, they start talking to each other more. Shared workflows, consistent practices, cross-platform knowledge sharing. It’s not magic: it's just good tooling doing what good tooling should do.
And if your company is already betting on React Native or Kotlin Multiplatform? Having a unified mobile DevOps platform becomes less of a strategic advantage and more of a strategic necessity.
But what about my consolidation strategy?
I can hear the objection already: "But we're trying to consolidate vendors, not add more!"
Remember: consolidate processes, not providers. Would you use the same tool for your financial reporting and your customer support tickets for the sake of “consolidation”? Of course you wouldn’t, because they're fundamentally different problems that require different solutions.
Mobile is a specialized discipline with specialized needs. Lumping in it with web and backend just because it’s all “development” is short-sighted at best. Treating it like just another workload to be absorbed into your general CI/CD tool is like using a Swiss Army knife to perform surgery—technically possible, but very messy with an extremely high likelihood of disaster.
All that aside, let’s be clear: when you bring your iOS and Android operations together onto a single platform designed for mobile, you are consolidating. You're also correctly acknowledging that not all workloads are created equal, and “one-size-fits-all” is fine for hotel bathrobes, less so for your mobile DevOps strategy.
Strategy isn’t always about the bottom line
Look, I get it. Consolidation is appealing. It's clean, it's simple, and it makes for great slides in quarterly reviews. But the best consolidation strategy isn't about having the fewest vendors—it's about having the right tools for the job.
Your mobile apps are often the primary way customers interact with your business. They're your brand, your user experience, and increasingly, your competitive differentiator. So does it really make sense to compromise on the infrastructure that builds and delivers your apps, just to reduce your vendor count?
The next time someone suggests moving everything to a single CI/CD platform "for simplicity," ask them this: Simplicity for who? If it's simplicity for your procurement team, for compliance and IT, then sure, one vendor is simpler. But if that simplicity is creating downstream complexity in execution, developer productivity, and time to market, then it’s time to reconsider the consolidation imperative.
Real strategic advantage doesn’t come from shoving square pegs into round holes and hoping for the best: it comes from using the most efficient tool for each critical function. And for mobile? That tool is a purpose-built, mobile-first platform that empowers your developers to work smarter, faster, and more in sync with each other.
Your mobile teams—and your customers—will thank you for it.
