Many mobile teams implement Embrace because they and their users complain of a poor in-app experience and the developers have a hunch its related to a specific API call. Common examples:
- In-app search for a product or video that is taking too long or freezing
- Images that are not displaying or taking a long time to render
- A startup that is taking a while and the potential cause is a vendor
Many of our larger, enterprise customers often have to prove to their back-end teams that an API call is broken. (One such customer calls them "2nd party" because its almost like the back-end team is a vendor.) Without evidence based on data that is more than a hunch or a complaint, back-end teams rarely act. In fact, they can push back as they rely on their own server-side tools that rarely report a problem. However, these same tools only see a partial story of the actual request/response and not the entire time for the call to resolve from a user's perspective or client-side errors at all.
A mobile-first observability platform measures each end-point by how the mobile users' experience the app, and errors and issues are uncovered that cannot be detected from the server-side.
With the proper visibility into all network calls, a mobile team can:
- Solve unresolved crashes for which a trace is not helpful but every single network call would resolve.
- Track every single network call whether 1st-party API, CDN, or 3rd-party SDK.
- Detect *all* network errors before they even reach the server so that no error is dropped.
- Quickly review and bubble up the calls that most frequently error or are slow to help prioritize which endpoints to fix first.
Embrace's network dashboard, called Watchdog, details a mobile app's networking performance, all in one place, surfacing top error-ing and slowest calls from all the app's APIs and third-party vendor SDKs. Customers can easily click into any path to see all the users and sessions affected by those calls. Detailed session timelines reproduce exactly where failed calls occur in the user's experience, and whether that user was noticeably affected.
