Fixing mobile app monitoring: A better way to debug apps in production

[gandharva]

Every mobile app tells a story through data - each user interaction, performance metric, and crash report reveals crucial insights about the application's health. But here's the challenge: these stories are scattered across a maze of tools, creating expensive blind spots that make incident resolution painfully slow.

Take a moment to count the tools your team uses to figure out the root cause of an issue. If you're like most mobile teams, your list might include tools for:

• User Experience: experience monitoring, product analytics
• Debugging: crash reporting, remote logging
• Issue Tracking: bug reporting, customer support

Each tool excels at its specific task, but together they create a fragmented view of your app's reality. When issues arise, developers become digital archaeologists, piecing together clues from these disconnected sources:

• "What sequence of events led to this crash?"
• "Why can't we reproduce this bug that users keep reporting?"
• "How was the app performing on this specific device before the issue occurred?"

Imagine trying to solve a puzzle where pieces are spread across different rooms – that's the daily challenge mobile teams face when debugging issues or optimizing performance. The answers exist, but they're trapped in silos across different tools.

The hidden costs you're already paying

1. The time and context trap

When a critical bug surfaces, your team doesn't just debug code – they become detectives. Developers navigate between disconnected tools, trying to piece together what happened: crash reports in one system, user sessions in another, and logs scattered elsewhere. A bug that should take hours to resolve stretches into days as developers spend more time investigating than fixing. Without unified context, they can't see the full picture: What was the user doing before the crash? How was the app performing? What other errors occurred? This fragmented view forces teams to make educated guesses and apply band-aid fixes rather than solve root causes.

2. The cost multiplier

The true cost of fragmented monitoring goes far beyond multiple subscription fees. The developers are maintaining multiple SDKs, managing separate configurations, and juggling different APIs – complexity that ripples through your entire development process. Add to this the costs of:

• time needed to understand each tool
• redundant data storage across systems
• integration maintenance and updates
• context-switching overhead

This adds huge cognitive load that could be spent building new features.

3. The trust and reputation impact

When users report issues, they expect swift, comprehensive solutions. Instead, fragmented monitoring forces teams to respond with vague answers like "We'll look into it" or "Could you provide more details?" Each inconclusive response erodes user trust and damages your app's reputation. More critically, this fractured view of app performance means teams often miss emerging issues until they've already affected multiple users. The result? A reactive rather than proactive approach to app quality, leading to frustrated users and increased churn.

Making a shift

The solution isn't adding more tools – it's unifying your monitoring strategy. Here's how to start:

1. Map essential debug data

Review recent incidents to identify what you need for effective debugging:

• User flows, sessions, and context
• Device states and performance metrics
• System logs and error traces
• Business context (user segments, feature flags)

2. Review current coverage

Examine your monitoring setup:

• Find overlapping data collection
• Identify critical blind spots
• Evaluate time spent correlating data

3. Choose your path

Pick an approach that's suitable for your scenario:

• Use Firebase SDK for Google Analytics to automatically get breadcrumb logs - these logs give you visibility into user actions leading up to a Crashlytics-collected event in your app.
• Build internal dashboards by connecting together data from various tools. You can use BI tools like- Metabase, Looker Studio etc.
• Buy a tool which fits your requirement and budget- search Crashlytics alternatives
• Adopt open-source tools like Measure; it captures all the necessary signals to correlate issues, considering what the user was doing, how the device was behaving, and the app's state, which enables developers to pinpoint the root cause more efficiently. It can be self-hosted and has Apache 2.0 license.

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The way forward

Your monitoring tool should connect user actions to performance data, track issues end-to-end, and help predict problems early. Start with your most painful debugging scenarios and scale based on your needs. Your users expect excellence, and your team deserves tools that help deliver it.

⭐ Check out Measure and star it for updates!