You don’t even know what bugs you have in your app
Olivier Destrebecq 📱
Crafting Digital Experiences for High-End Social Clubs | Tech & Product Lead | Blending French & American Perspectives | Rock Climber, Mountain Biker, snowboarder
As an app project owner, you have an excuse . But the worst part is that it’s true in a lot of cases even if you are the developer on the app.
A few month ago, I was hired by a French startup for a firefighting mission. For the last 6 month, half of their users could not sign in.
Their users were able to create an account and then nothing. When they signed in, the user would be bounced immediately back to the sign-in screen.
Talk about a bad first impression for the users.
The CEO was very conscious this was an issue because his users were complaining all over his facebook group. But they could not reproduce the issue and did not have a clue as to what was happening.
The CTO could not find the source of the issue, so the CEO went and talked to other startups to see if anyone had seen this issue (they were using parse and facebook sign in).
Then finally, we got in touch and I dove in. Fairly quickly, I had the same answer as his CTO. I don’t see anything in your code that is blatantly wrong, I don’t know what the issue is.
But I offered him a potential way out. Clearly his user were having issues, so clearly at some point during the sign in process an error must happen.
How could we record that error so we could see it?
So I installed rollbar (an error monitoring service) and within a couple hours of releasing the app to his beta testers we had the error staring at us.
It took a bit more research to find the solution, but the main point here is: they did not know about the issue until their user complained (loudly).
Instrumenting your app to catch all those unlikely errors is a lot faster than implementing bullet proof error handling. It’s also a super cheap insurance. You’ll know about those issues as soon as your users run into them. Best of all, you’ll have a clue to help you solve it.
Talk to you dev about error monitoring. This could save you a lot of time and stress further down the road.
What about you, are you using error monitoring in your app? What are you tracking? How is it helping you? If not get in touch and I can point you in the right direction.