Mobile apps operate on fundamentally different release cycles than web applications - you can't just push a fix when something breaks. Apple's App Store review can take days, Google Play updates roll out gradually, and users control when they update. This reality makes A/B testing essential for mobile teams who need to validate features before committing to a release that might live on devices for weeks or months.
Traditional experimentation platforms weren't built for these constraints. They drain battery life with constant network requests, bloat app size with heavy SDKs, and fail to handle offline scenarios gracefully. A proper mobile A/B testing tool needs sub-millisecond evaluation speeds, minimal SDK footprint, and robust offline support - plus the statistical rigor to make confident decisions from smaller mobile user bases.
This guide examines seven options for mobile A/B testing that address delivering the experimentation capabilities teams actually need.
Statsig combines experimentation, feature flags, analytics, and session replay in one platform designed specifically for modern product teams. The platform handles over 1 trillion events daily while maintaining sub-millisecond SDK performance that mobile apps require. Unlike legacy tools that bolt on mobile support, Statsig built its infrastructure from day one to handle the unique constraints of mobile development.
The platform offers both warehouse-native and hosted deployment options - teams can keep sensitive data in their own Snowflake or BigQuery instances, or use Statsig's managed infrastructure. This flexibility has attracted companies like OpenAI and Notion who need enterprise-grade experimentation without the typical enterprise complexity. The unified approach means metrics stay consistent whether you're testing a new onboarding flow or analyzing session replays.
"With mobile development, our release schedule is driven by the App Store review cycle, which can sometimes take days. Using Statsig's feature flags, we're able to move faster by putting new features behind delayed and staged rollouts, and progressively testing the new features." — Paul Frazee, CTO, Bluesky
Statsig delivers enterprise-grade mobile experimentation with advanced statistics and performance optimization built for scale.
Advanced experimentation capabilities
CUPED variance reduction cuts experiment runtime by 30-50% through pre-experiment data
Sequential testing enables early stopping when results reach statistical significance
Switchback tests measure network effects in marketplace and social apps
Stratified sampling ensures balanced user allocation across segments
Mobile-optimized infrastructure
<1ms SDK evaluation after initialization keeps apps responsive
30+ native SDKs including Swift, Kotlin, React Native, and Flutter
Edge computing support reduces latency for global mobile apps
Offline mode caches assignments when devices lose connectivity
Automated safeguards
Metric guardrails automatically pause experiments harming key metrics
Real-time health checks monitor SDK performance and data quality
Automatic rollbacks trigger when metrics move beyond thresholds
Exposure event validation ensures accurate user assignment tracking
Unified platform benefits
Single metrics catalog eliminates discrepancies between tools
Feature flag integration turns any release into an A/B test
Session replay linking shows actual user behavior in test variants
Warehouse native option keeps sensitive data in your infrastructure
"Implementing on our CDN edge and in our nextjs app was straight-forward and seamless. We use Trunk Based Development and without Statsig we would not be able to do it." — G2 Review
Statsig offers unlimited feature flags at all usage levels, making it the most cost-effective option for growing mobile teams. The free tier includes 2M events monthly plus 50K session replays - enough for serious experimentation programs to get started.
Engineers praise the transparent SQL queries and open-source SDKs that show exactly how metrics are calculated. The platform integrates cleanly with existing CI/CD pipelines, and documentation actually covers the edge cases you'll hit in production.
Processing 6 trillion events monthly across 2.5 billion users isn't just a vanity metric - it means the infrastructure handles traffic spikes without breaking a sweat. Microsoft and Atlassian trust Statsig for mission-critical experiments where downtime isn't an option.
The shared Slack channel connects you directly with Statsig engineers who understand your technical challenges. Customer success teams include actual data scientists who can help design complex experimental frameworks, not just troubleshoot basic issues.
"Our engineers are significantly happier using Statsig. They no longer deal with uncertainty and debugging frustrations. There's a noticeable shift in sentiment—experimentation has become something the team is genuinely excited about." — Sumeet Marwaha, Head of Data, Brex
You'll need to implement tracking events before running experiments - typically a 1-2 sprint investment depending on app complexity. Warehouse-native deployments also require existing data pipelines to be in place.
Marketing teams running basic landing page tests might find the statistical features overwhelming. The platform clearly targets product and engineering teams who need rigorous experimentation, not simple A/B testing.
Creating experiments requires understanding metrics and segments at a technical level. Non-technical users will need training on statistical concepts since visual WYSIWYG editors aren't the primary interface.
Firebase A/B Testing integrates directly with Google's Remote Config and Analytics to enable mobile experimentation without code deployments. Built specifically for developers already using Firebase services, it offers a zero-friction path to testing app parameters and user engagement metrics. The tight integration means you can modify experiment variables instantly across your entire user base without waiting for app store approvals.
Google's machine learning algorithms automatically optimize experiments by identifying winning variants based on your chosen success metrics. This automation reduces the manual monitoring burden, though it comes at the cost of statistical transparency. Firebase targets mobile developers who prioritize speed and simplicity over advanced experimental design capabilities.
Firebase delivers mobile-first experimentation through deep integration with Google's ecosystem and automated optimization.
Mobile-first experimentation
Native Android and iOS SDK integration with Firebase suite
Remote Config parameter testing without app store submissions
Real-time experiment parameter updates across user sessions
Automatic variant selection based on performance data
Automated optimization
Machine learning algorithms select winning variants automatically
Predictive analytics identify likely experiment outcomes early
Smart traffic allocation adjusts user distribution during tests
Goal-based optimization for conversion metrics
Google ecosystem integration
Seamless Analytics 4 event tracking and conversion measurement
BigQuery data export for advanced analysis workflows
Cloud Messaging integration for targeted user communications
Authentication service connection for user segmentation
Audience management
Automatic user segmentation based on app behavior patterns
Custom audience creation using Analytics demographic data
Geographic and device-based targeting without manual setup
Cohort analysis for understanding user retention
Firebase's generous free tier covers most startups through their growth phase. You can run multiple concurrent experiments without hitting billing thresholds until you reach significant scale.
Remote Config changes propagate immediately without app updates. This speed advantage is crucial when you need to react quickly to user feedback or market changes.
If you're already using Firebase services, A/B testing requires minimal additional setup. The unified SDK and consistent user identification across services eliminate integration headaches.
Google's algorithms handle the heavy lifting of traffic allocation and winner selection. For teams without dedicated data scientists, this automation provides sophisticated optimization out of the box.
Firebase lacks advanced methods like CUPED variance reduction or sequential testing that can significantly reduce experiment runtime. You're stuck with basic t-tests that might miss subtle but important effects.
The platform doesn't show how it calculates significance or makes decisions. This black-box approach makes it impossible to verify results or adjust confidence levels for different risk tolerances.
Extracting data requires BigQuery setup, and advanced features depend heavily on other Google Cloud services. Teams using mixed analytics stacks face real integration challenges.
Firebase can't handle web or server-side experiments effectively. Companies with multi-platform products need separate tools, increasing complexity and costs across their experimentation stack.
Optimizely entered the market as a visual website optimizer for marketers but has since expanded into full-stack experimentation. The platform now supports mobile apps through SDKs, though its architecture still reflects those web-first origins. Enterprise customers with deep pockets form their core market - the pricing model requires significant budget commitments before accessing features that come standard elsewhere.
The legacy architecture creates complexity that newer platforms avoid. Mobile teams often struggle with heavy SDKs that impact app performance, while the visual editor that made Optimizely famous provides little value for native app development. Still, their decade-plus experience means they've encountered nearly every edge case in experimentation.
Optimizely provides comprehensive experimentation capabilities wrapped in enterprise governance and compliance features.
Visual editor and web optimization
Drag-and-drop interface lets marketers create tests without developer involvement
A/B testing capabilities for web pages and content personalization
Real-time preview shows changes before experiments go live
Multi-page funnel experiments track conversion paths
Full-stack experimentation
SDKs support mobile and server-side testing across programming languages
Feature flagging enables controlled rollouts and instant rollbacks
Holdout groups measure long-term impact of experiment programs
Multi-armed bandit algorithms for dynamic traffic allocation
Statistical engine
False discovery rate control prevents inflated significance
Sequential testing allows early stopping at statistical significance
Mutual exclusivity ensures experiments don't interfere
Custom primary metrics and guardrail monitoring
Enterprise governance
Approval workflows require stakeholder sign-off before launch
Audit trails track every change for compliance requirements
Role-based permissions control experiment access
Program management dashboards for executive reporting
A decade of running enterprise experiments means Optimizely has seen it all. Their platform handles complex scenarios that might trip up newer competitors.
ISO certifications and SOC 2 compliance satisfy regulated industries. Financial services and healthcare companies appreciate the comprehensive audit trails and approval workflows.
Dedicated teams help design experiment programs and train internal staff. This hand-holding appeals to organizations without existing experimentation expertise.
Marketing teams can launch web experiments without developer resources. This self-service capability works well for content and design testing on websites.
Experimentation platform costs analysis shows Optimizely among the priciest options. Monthly active user pricing can reach tens of thousands per month for growing apps.
Mobile SDKs add over 100KB to app bundles - a significant weight that impacts download rates and app store rankings. Performance-conscious teams often look elsewhere.
Basic reporting covers experiment results, but deeper product analytics need separate BI tools. You'll end up paying for multiple platforms to get complete insights.
The platform's flexibility comes with configuration complexity requiring dedicated resources. Many teams need months of setup time before running their first meaningful experiment.
LaunchDarkly built its reputation as the enterprise standard for feature flag management, with experimentation capabilities added later as an optional module. The platform excels at sophisticated targeting rules and instant feature toggles, making it the go-to choice for risk-averse enterprises that prioritize control over statistical rigor. Their global relay proxy network ensures flags evaluate quickly worldwide, though this infrastructure focus comes at a steep price.
The experimentation add-on feels secondary to their core feature management strengths. While you can run A/B tests on features controlled by flags, the statistical analysis lacks the depth of dedicated experimentation platforms. Teams often find themselves paying premium prices for basic testing functionality that requires significant additional tooling to match competitors' capabilities.
LaunchDarkly delivers enterprise-grade feature management with experimentation as an additional layer.
Feature flag management
Advanced targeting rules with percentage rollouts and custom attributes
Approval workflows and change management for enterprise compliance
Real-time flag updates with instant kill-switches for rollbacks
Flag retirement workflows to prevent technical debt accumulation
Experimentation add-on
Basic A/B testing functionality integrated with existing flags
Limited metric support compared to dedicated platforms
Statistical analysis requires manual interpretation
Custom event tracking through SDK instrumentation
Enterprise infrastructure
Global relay proxy network reduces latency worldwide
SOC 2 Type II compliance and security certifications
Extensive SDK support covering all major platforms
Edge computing capabilities for flag evaluation
Integration capabilities
API-first architecture enables custom workflows
Data export options for analytics connections
Webhook support for triggering external systems
Audit log streaming to SIEM platforms
SOC 2 Type II certification and comprehensive audit trails reassure large organizations. The security posture meets requirements that keep procurement teams happy.
Targeting rules go far beyond simple percentage rollouts. Complex boolean logic, custom attributes, and user cohorts enable precise feature control.
The relay proxy network ensures low latency worldwide while handling billions of flag evaluations. This scale matters for global mobile apps with distributed user bases.
SDK coverage spans virtually every language and framework including specialized support for React Native, Flutter, and Unity. Integration is straightforward regardless of tech stack.
LaunchDarkly's pricing becomes prohibitive at scale, charging per flag evaluation rather than offering unlimited usage. High-traffic apps face budget-breaking cost increases.
The experimentation module lacks CUPED, sequential testing, or other variance reduction methods. You'll need separate tools for sophisticated A/B testing, defeating the purpose of an integrated platform.
API polling for data warehouse integration leads to metric drift and delayed insights. Real-time analytics alignment remains elusive without significant custom engineering.
Enterprise focus means extensive configuration that overwhelms smaller teams. You'll need dedicated DevOps resources just to keep the platform running smoothly.
PostHog positions itself as an open-source alternative to commercial product analytics platforms, bundling feature flags and A/B testing alongside its core analytics offering. The platform appeals to privacy-conscious startups who want to self-host their data rather than send it to third-party services. However, this bundled approach creates a pricing model that charges separately for each capability - making it surprisingly expensive when you need multiple features.
According to pricing analysis, PostHog consistently costs 2-3x more than alternatives across typical usage scenarios. The self-hosting option requires significant infrastructure investment and ongoing maintenance that many teams underestimate. While the open-source model provides transparency, it also means you're responsible for scaling, security, and updates.
PostHog combines product analytics, feature management, and experimentation in an integrated open-source platform.
Analytics and tracking
Autocapture automatically tracks user interactions without manual setup
Session replay records user sessions for qualitative analysis
JavaScript SDK enables quick web implementation
Custom event properties for detailed behavioral tracking
Feature management
Feature flags support percentage rollouts and targeting
Boolean flags provide simple on/off functionality
Release management includes scheduling and rollouts
Multi-variate flags for complex feature variations
Experimentation
A/B testing uses sequential testing methodology
Experiment setup integrates with flag infrastructure
Basic statistical analysis with confidence intervals
Conversion funnel analysis for experiment variants
Infrastructure options
Self-hosted deployment gives full data control
Cloud hosting available for managed infrastructure
Plugin marketplace extends core functionality
Data export APIs for warehouse integration
The transparent codebase lets teams customize functionality for unique requirements. You can modify the platform to fit specific mobile stacks or data processing needs.
Self-hosted deployment satisfies strict privacy requirements and data governance policies. Your user data never leaves your infrastructure, which matters for regulated industries.
All tools share the same data foundation, reducing setup complexity. The unified interface means less context switching between analytics and experimentation.
Community-built extensions add specialized functionality through the marketplace. Popular plugins include data warehouse connectors and custom visualization tools.
Separate charges for flags, experiments, and replays accumulate quickly. Feature flag pricing analysis shows PostHog as the second most expensive option after LaunchDarkly.
Self-hosted deployments require significant server management and scaling work. You'll need dedicated infrastructure resources that smaller teams rarely have available.
Mobile SDKs lag behind web counterparts in features and performance. Android and iOS implementations miss functionality that JavaScript users take for granted.
A/B testing lacks variance reduction, automated guardrails, or other advanced methods. The sequential testing provides basic analysis but misses sophisticated techniques that reduce experiment runtime.
Split takes a unique approach as a data-first feature delivery platform, automatically deriving experiment analytics from feature flag impression streams. Their architecture processes every flag interaction to generate insights without manual instrumentation - an approach that appeals to engineering teams tired of maintaining separate analytics events. The platform emphasizes real-time data processing and enterprise compliance features that larger organizations require.
The automated impact measurement sounds compelling, but it assumes your feature flags map cleanly to business metrics. Mobile teams often find this model limiting when experiments span multiple features or require custom success metrics. Split targets engineering-heavy organizations that value automation over flexibility in their experimentation programs.
Split centers on automated experimentation through feature flag impressions and enterprise delivery infrastructure.
Real-time analytics and alerting
Automatic exposure logging captures every flag interaction
Real-time alerting triggers when metrics exceed thresholds
Impact dashboards visualize feature performance automatically
Anomaly detection identifies unexpected metric movements
Enterprise compliance and workflow integration
Change audit logs track every flag modification with attribution
Git workflow integrations enable flag management through PRs
SLA guarantees provide uptime commitments for critical features
RBAC controls limit access to sensitive experiments
Advanced targeting and delivery
Percentage rollouts enable gradual feature releases
User segmentation supports complex targeting rules
Multi-environment support separates dev, staging, and production
Traffic allocation algorithms ensure statistical validity
SDK and integration ecosystem
Client and server SDKs cover major languages and frameworks
API-first architecture enables custom integrations
Streaming clients provide low-latency flag evaluations
Data pipeline connectors for major warehouses
Split eliminates manual event logging by capturing flag impressions automatically. This reduces implementation overhead and ensures consistent data collection across experiments.
Uptime guarantees and performance commitments satisfy large organizations. Compliance features and audit trails help teams meet regulatory requirements while maintaining velocity.
Managing flags through pull requests maintains existing development practices. This integration helps teams adopt feature flags without changing their workflow.
Built-in analytics measure feature impact immediately without separate tools. Teams get instant feedback on how changes affect key metrics.
Analysis relies primarily on t-tests without advanced techniques. Teams requiring CUPED or sequential testing need additional statistical tools.
Pricing becomes unclear above 200K monthly active users. The lack of transparency complicates budget planning for growing organizations.
iOS and Android SDKs add noticeable weight due to streaming requirements. Mobile teams must balance feature capabilities against app size concerns.
The flag-to-metric mapping doesn't handle complex experiments well. Custom success metrics or multi-feature tests require workarounds that complicate analysis.
Eppo takes a fundamentally different approach as a warehouse-native experimentation platform built for analytics teams who refuse to compromise on data control. Rather than requiring you to send events to external systems, Eppo operates directly within your Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks environment. All statistical calculations happen through transparent SQL queries you can inspect and modify - a level of transparency that appeals to data teams burned by black-box platforms.
This architecture makes sense for organizations with mature data infrastructure and dedicated analytics resources. However, mobile teams often struggle with Eppo's limited feature management capabilities. You'll need to build custom gating logic around exposure events rather than using built-in feature flags, adding complexity to what should be straightforward mobile experiments.
Eppo delivers warehouse-native architecture with statistical flexibility for data-driven experimentation teams.
Warehouse-native architecture
Direct connection to existing data warehouses without data movement
Support for Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and Databricks
Column-level security maintains warehouse permissions
Zero data replication reduces compliance concerns
Statistical analysis
Both Bayesian and frequentist inference methods available
CUPED variance reduction increases experiment sensitivity
Customizable statistics framework for advanced use cases
Transparent SQL queries show exact calculations
Metrics and dashboards
Pre-computed metrics registry ensures consistent definitions
Looker-style dashboards for data exploration
Custom metric creation with SQL-based definitions
Automated metric health monitoring and alerts
SDK and implementation
Lightweight SDK focuses on assignment logging only
Minimal client-side performance impact
Server-side SDKs for backend experimentation
Exposure event validation prevents data quality issues
Sensitive data never leaves your warehouse environment. Existing security protocols and access controls remain intact without additional compliance overhead.
Open SQL queries let you verify every calculation. Data teams can understand and trust results rather than accepting black-box outputs.
Leverage existing infrastructure investments and compute resources. Your data engineering workflows continue unchanged without additional ETL processes.
Supporting both Bayesian and frequentist approaches gives teams options. Advanced users can customize the framework to match specific analytical needs.
Eppo lacks feature flag rollout controls and progressive deployment. You'll need separate tools for feature management beyond basic assignment.
Data engineers must maintain ETL pipelines to populate experiment data. This requirement creates bottlenecks without dedicated data engineering resources.
No session replay, autocapture, or comprehensive product analytics. Teams need additional tools for complete user behavior visibility.
Building custom gating logic around exposure events requires more development work than full-featured experimentation platforms. Mobile teams often find this approach cumbersome.
Choosing the right mobile A/B testing platform depends on your team's specific constraints and priorities. If you need a unified solution that handles the complete experimentation lifecycle with minimal overhead, Statsig offers the best balance of features, performance, and cost. For teams already embedded in Google's ecosystem, Firebase provides a frictionless starting point. Organizations with mature data infrastructure might prefer Eppo's warehouse-native approach.
The key is matching platform capabilities to your mobile development reality. Consider SDK performance impact, offline support, and release cycle integration before committing. Remember that the most sophisticated statistics won't help if your SDK slows down the app or your team can't implement experiments efficiently.
For more insights on experimentation platforms and pricing comparisons, check out the detailed cost analysis and feature flag platform comparison. Your mobile users deserve experiments that enhance rather than degrade their experience.
Hope you find this useful!