Mobile Platform Consolidation

When I joined B&H, mobile wasn’t the dominant sales channel. It was underperforming—fragmented across mobile web, Android, and iOS, and trailing desktop in both experience and revenue impact. The initial work wasn’t about consolidation. It was about making mobile matter. Through focused improvements to performance, navigation, and purchase flow, mobile began to scale. Revenue followed. Engagement deepened. Mobile transitioned from a secondary channel into a meaningful growth driver for the business. That success, however, surfaced a new problem.

As mobile revenue increased, the cost of fragmentation became impossible to ignore. B&H was now operating three parallel mobile sales channels—each with its own design patterns, release cadence, and maintenance overhead. What once felt like optionality had become drag. Android had emerged as the lowest-performing channel, yet it carried the same operational burden as iOS. Mobile web remained the most flexible environment for experimentation, but lacked the performance and engagement characteristics expected from a modern mobile experience. The surface issue looked like channel efficiency. The deeper issue was leverage. As the company rapidly experimented with layout changes, journey improvements, and loyalty mechanics, fragmentation slowed exactly the work that had made mobile successful.

Mobile was no longer an experiment. It was core to the business. Continuing to scale without consolidation meant: • Slower iteration during a critical growth phase • Inconsistent brand and interaction patterns across devices • Compounding maintenance cost as experimentation accelerated The goal wasn’t simplification for its own sake. It was to protect momentum while restoring coherence.

The decision wasn’t whether to invest in mobile—that had already paid off. The question was how to invest more intelligently. Rather than maintaining Android as a fully separate native experience, the strategy consolidated the lowest-performing channel with the mobile web experience through a Progressive Web App (PWA) approach. This preserved Android reach while collapsing two stacks into one. The PWA wasn’t treated as a shortcut. It was treated as an economies-of-scale decision. This consolidation created coherence where optionality had become drag—allowing improvements elsewhere to ship once and compound, rather than multiply complexity across channels. At the same time, iOS remained a distinct native investment. Performance, engagement, and customer expectations justified continued platform-specific depth. The strategy wasn’t dogmatic—it was selective.

The mobile experience became more coherent as the business continued to grow. Teams shipped faster. Experiments ran cleaner. Customers encountered a consistent B&H experience regardless of entry point. Android retained coverage without disproportionate cost. Mobile web gained performance and reliability. iOS continued to evolve independently where it delivered clear value. Most importantly, mobile strategy shifted from making mobile work to making mobile scalable.

Success creates its own constraints. The real work is knowing when to consolidate before growth turns into drag.