Mobile.dev: the new standard for mobile development
Announcing Cowboy Ventures’ investment in Mobile.dev
By: Amanda Robson
Today, we’re excited to announce our partnership with mobile.dev as they set the new standard for mobile application development.
Mobile development has not received the attention it deserves, despite what a huge industry mobile has become. Consumers spent over $143 billion on mobile apps last year, driving 218 billion new app downloads globally¹.
Millions (if not billions) of people around the world rely on mobile apps to manage their day-to-day lives whether it’s paying bills, ordering cars, getting food delivered or shopping. Mobile is the primary interface for many companies to interact with their users. Companies such as Spotify, Airbnb, Slack, Uber and Chase use mobile to build user engagement and delight.
And yet, the way mobile apps are developed hasn’t meaningfully changed in over a decade. Bugs and performance issues are caught after apps are released which is a BIG problem. When mobile apps crash, freeze, or show errors 53% of users will uninstall. This leads to lost revenue for companies and lots of work for developers who have to spend significant time putting out fires.
Mobile.dev plans to change this broken process with a platform that catches bugs and performance issues before mobile apps are released.
One of the best mobile app experiences today is Uber. As a frequent user, I’ve always been impressed with the lack of downtime, slowdowns and bugs. One of the brains behind Uber’s mobile experience has been mobile.dev CEO, Leland Takamine.
When we heard Leland had left Uber to build a platform to give developers the ability to ship apps with Uber-level quality, we were excited. And Leland has partnered up with an amazing cofounder, Jake Krupski. After many years at Google and IBM selling cloud and automation products, Jake will build and scale mobile.dev’s GTM and operations efforts. They are a 🔥🔥 combination.
The mobile.dev platform allows companies to catch issues that impact quality before apps or app updates are released to users. Their platform plugs into the CI process, blocking code changes that will degrade the app experience. It then alerts developers who can address issues using mobile.dev’s root cause analysis tool.
Mobile.dev is starting with bugs and performance issues, then plans to address all aspects of app quality including battery consumption, security, networking and memory usage.
The ROI for companies who use mobile.dev is huge. A better user experience means happier users, which translates into higher app engagement and a higher quality business. In addition, automating parts of the mobile app development process reduces engineering time spent finding bugs and performance issues manually.
Mobile.dev’s customer, Reddit, has experienced this value proposition first-hand. A high-quality, high uptime mobile app is critical for Reddit’s user community; they want to provide a flawless experience for their ~50M monthly active mobile users, and mobile.dev will be a key part of achieving that.
“Historically, our team has relied on manual processes for finding performance issues during development. Our integration with mobile.dev has allowed us to ‘shift-left’ by automatically finding and addressing quality issues before we ship products. As our team continues to grow, we’ll be able to focus more on building rather than chasing down problems in production.”
Saad Rehmani, VP of Engineering, Reddit
We’re extremely excited to partner with the mobile.dev team as they redefine how mobile apps are developed, enabling developers to focus on building rather than chasing down QA fixes.
In addition, Team Cowboy is thrilled to have awesome co-investors and angels join us in this round.
These include investors Tim Chen from Essence VC, Forum Ventures and the Uber’s angels syndicate Moving Capital; Android leaders Ty Smith and Pierre-Yves Ricau; DevOps founders Ben Sigelman from Lightstep, Marco Palladino from Kong, Tuomas Artman from Linear and Luciano Cheng; and leading operators and engineering leaders Surahbi Gupta from Robinhood, Emilie Choi from Coinbase, Mike Curtis from Airbnb / Facebook / Yahoo and Ceci Stallsmith from Slack among others!
And finally — the team is hiring! They’re looking for a stellar Infrastructure Lead to join them on their mission. Feel free to reach out directly to hello@mobile.dev or via the job posting.
¹App Annie State of Mobile 2021 Report.
