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Getting started with OpenTelemetry for mobile: Key takeaways

Eduardo Gonzalez
OpenTelemetry
5 September 2025 • 2 min read
The Embrace and OpenTelemtry logos.

Mobile engineers often hear that OpenTelemetry is the standard — but applying it to mobile is harder than it looks. In our latest Getting Started webinar, we walked through the pitfalls of vanilla OTel and how Embrace helps teams instrument in minutes. Here’s the recap, with clips and resources to help you try it yourself.

If you missed the live session, you can watch the full recording here. In the meantime, here are the highlights ?

Why vanilla OTel is tough on mobile

OpenTelemetry has become the industry standard for observability. But when you try to apply it directly to mobile apps, some painful gaps appear:

  • Unreliable networks → data gets dropped or delayed for minutes (or even days).
  • Device fragmentation → “P50 latency” doesn’t mean much when it spans thousands of device/OS combinations.
  • OS constraints → background apps can be killed, losing telemetry unless you persist it carefully.
  • Missing user context → a crash trace shows the failure, but not what the user was actually doing.

These challenges make it hard for mobile engineers to connect technical signals to real user impact.

The Embrace and OpenTelemtry logos.

The faster way: instrument once with Embrace

Instead of wiring up multiple OTel SDKs, exporters, and configs, you can get full OTel-compliant data in minutes with Embrace.

? Watch the 5-minute demo clip

  • Automatic instrumentation for crashes, app launches, ANRs, and network calls.
  • Mobile-aware features like offline persistence and retry logic.
  • Built-in session timelines to tie technical data back to user journeys.

If you want to try it out, you can follow our step-by-step guides for Android, iOS, and more.

Beyond vanilla OTel: richer context out of the box

Vanilla OTel gives you spans and traces — but it stops short of telling you what the user was actually doing when things broke.

With Embrace, you get:

  • Full user timelines (tap → API call → crash)
  • Mobile-specific context (device, OS, network)
  • Session stitching to replay exactly what happened

This means you can go from “we saw 500 crashes” to “checkout fails on Android 13 devices using LTE.” That’s the clarity mobile teams need.

Want to go deeper on instrumentation? Check out our iOS OpenTelemetry exporter walkthrough for a step-by-step tutorial with code samples.

Unify mobile + backend in Grafana

Because Embrace is OTel-native, your mobile data can live right alongside backend metrics and traces in Grafana, Datadog, and more.

? Watch the 2-min Grafana export walkthrough

No brittle transformations, no proprietary formats — just standard OTLP data with mobile-specific enrichments layered in.

Key takeaways

  • OTel matters for mobile — but vanilla setup is complex and incomplete.
  • Embrace simplifies it — giving you production-ready telemetry in minutes.
  • Mobile + backend together — finally a unified view of your user experience.

Next steps

If you’d like to try it yourself, you can get started with a free Embrace account — it comes with 5 seats, 3 days of retention, and up to 1M user sessions per year.

Embrace Deliver incredible mobile experiences with Embrace.

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Author
Eduardo Gonzalez
Eduardo Gonzalez
Eduardo Gonzalez is on the marketing team at Embrace. He has held marketing roles at Grafana Labs and GitLab, working on campaigns and community programs for developer audiences. He’s based in Vancouver and is passionate about helping engineering teams discover tools that improve both developer and user experience.
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