Mobile teams around the world have been using Embrace’s technology for years to optimize their apps and bring fast, stable, and all-around amazing experiences to their end users. As a company, we’ve grown alongside many of these customers, and we’ve partnered closely with them to build and refine features that serve the needs of an increasingly mobile world.
Building on those partnerships, our goal is to deepen our collaboration with the mobile community. That’s why we’re excited to announce that our Android SDK is now open source and live on GitHub, with our iOS developer SDK coming in January 2024.
This step forward for Embrace will make it easier than ever for mobile engineers to leverage our technology to build better apps, regardless of whether they choose to do business with us or not. Read on for some more details about our open source plans.
The benefits of going open source
Going open source was a big undertaking for our engineers, but it was the right decision for a number of reasons.
For mobile engineers who currently use (or are considering) our tool, having open source SDKs makes it easy to understand exactly how our technology empowers them to build faster, more stable, and more performant apps.
It also signals our commitment to becoming more active participants in mobile communities where we can both contribute to the development of technology that pushes the industry forward, while benefiting from the contributions of others.
Trust and transparency
Our customers trust Embrace with a very important job – making sure that their apps are performing well and helping them resolve issues when they’re not.
By making the Embrace SDK they rely on open source, we can give our users greater visibility into how our technology does what we say it does. Developing out in the open like this is about providing a greater level of transparency that fosters trust in our product and our company.
Collaboration
One of the great things about open source tools is their ability to receive contributions from engineers across varied backgrounds and regions.
After all, collaboration with our customers has always been a part of our DNA, so why not take this one step further?
We’re excited to see how much we can improve our products based on feedback from others in the mobile community by going open source.
Data portability
Moving toward open source tooling has another added benefit for our users: data portability.
This refers to users’ ability to easily transfer their data across different systems or platforms if they choose to switch vendors.
Rather than being locked-in to a certain type of data storage, our open source SDKs will soon be OpenTelemetry compliant, letting you collect and process data in a way that’s compatible with many other services. Customers using Performance Tracing in our Android SDK are already benefitting from OTEL-compatible APIs, with their iOS counterparts being able to take advantage of these in January.
Ultimately, this will give Embrace customers the flexibility and peace-of-mind to do what they want with their data, even if they choose to stop using our tools.
Using the OpenTelemetry framework
As mentioned above, our SDKs are on their way to being fully compliant with the OpenTelemetry framework. This means we can provide our customers with data portability and let them avoid vendor lock-in, a serious benefit of choosing an open source tool.
The OpenTelemetry framework is a collection of APIs, SDKs, and tools that can be used to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data. Telemetry data refers to metric, logs, and traces, and it’s exactly the type of data that engineers rely on to analyze and improve their apps’ performance.
Critical features in Embrace’s SDKs, which provide both automatic and custom instrumentation options for collecting data, adhere to the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions. These enable frictionless export of data to other systems.
Our new Performance Tracing feature is a great example of this, with the APIs in our open source Android SDK written to adhere to OTEL conventions.
Where to find our docs
If you’re interested in checking out Embrace for yourself, head over to our docs site for more detail on our Android, iOS, Flutter, React Native, and Unity SDKs.
Our Android SDK is now fully open source on GitHub, so have a look at our source code and early contribution guidelines. As our open source initiative is in its early stages, we’ll be releasing fuller contribution guidelines very soon.
We’re not currently seeking new committers, but you are welcome to create a Github issue explaining your requirements.
If you’ve found a bug, please contribute a failing integration test case so we can study and fix it. And, if you have a new feature idea, please get in touch with us support@embrace.io or create a Github issue.
Lastly, look out for our iOS SDK code in early 2024.
We’re excited to be on this open source journey with you!
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