Signs You Have Outgrown Your Mobile Monitoring Solution
Imagine you start a new hobby — let’s say bike riding. You don’t want to invest a lot in a bike because you’re not sure that you’ll like it. Luckily, you snag a free bike from a friend. It’s clunky, but the price is right. You start out with short rides around your neighborhood and eventually find yourself riding every day, going on longer and longer rides. Your free, heavy bike is holding you back. Now that you’re cycling more seriously, it’s time for a better bike.
Mobile monitoring is like that. When you first start building a mobile app, a free tool may be fine for identifying and solving most crashes. But as your user base grows and you want to improve mobile stability and performance to gain higher ratings and boost your visibility on app stores, you need a better tool. Here are some signs that you’ve outgrown your mobile monitoring tool.
1. You Get So Many Alerts that You’ve Started to Tune Them out
To solve a mobile crash, you first need to know that something is wrong. Well-defined alerts notify you when a crash or performance issue is affecting enough users to warrant immediate attention. If your mobile monitoring doesn’t provide meaningful and issue-specific alerts, you and your team won’t know which crashes, errors and issues really demand your attention and which are just false alarms. Pretty soon, you’ll start ignoring them. And if you’re ignoring all your alerts, it’s like you have no alerts at all.
2. You Don’t Have Enough Context to Solve Crashes Fast
Knowing that crashes and other errors are happening is important, but without the right context, it’s hard to identify the root cause and solve it fast. You need to collect enough data from user sessions to resolve issues quickly, including user metadata (device type, location, app version), user actions (the steps a user took that led up to the crash or error), screenshots and view hierarchy. Grouping errors is helpful to isolate the issue impact to specific devices or versions. Stack traces with un-minified source code give you insight into the sequence of events that lead to the bug as well as the line of code where you can find the bug. If you have two-way integrations with source code management platforms like GitHub, you can even determine the original owner of the commit who might know exactly what happened.
3. You Are Wasting Time Dealing with Broken Workflows
If you are building a mobile app solo or with a very small team, you may not notice minor snags in your workflow. But, as your app grows and many developers are collaborating across teams, inefficiencies in your workflow can really slow you down. We usually hear about two types of workflow challenges from users:
- Issue triage and assignment: keeping track of issues to solve and owners to solve them
- Tool integration: ensuring critical data flows between key apps and services, like Jira and GitHub
Because they are intended for smaller teams, entry-level mobile monitoring solutions lack the workflow tooling that most organizations need to find and fix bugs, errors and performance issues smoothly. Investing in a tool that streamlines your workflows is well worth it — the less time your team spends troubleshooting, the more time they can spend building.
4. You No Longer Trust the Data You’re Seeing
Unfortunately, we have heard from many users that entry-level mobile monitoring tools do not report all crashes or errors. When they compare crash reports from their monitoring console to the Google Play Developer or App Store Connect Console, there are often discrepancies in the results. You can only solve the crashes and errors that you know about. If your customers are experiencing issues that go unreported, it will negatively affect their experience.
5. Your Users Are Complaining
This is probably the most important sign that you have outgrown your mobile monitoring solution. If you aren’t able to accurately identify and quickly solve issues that are affecting the stability and performance of your mobile application, your customers will get frustrated, leave bad reviews and potentially abandon your app altogether. In most cases, the primary benefit of an entry-level mobile monitoring solution is that it is no cost. But, when you consider that 48% of users will delete an app after experiencing a single performance issue, and for every one-second delay in screen load times, conversions drop by 7%, a “free” mobile monitoring solution that indirectly hurts customer experience will cost you.
If any of these signs ring true, it’s probably time to move on from your current monitoring solution. The success of your mobile application depends on it.
