Embrace Feature Releases for 7/20/2021

We’re so excited to share our latest features and improvements to the Embrace dashboard!

In this post, we’ll give a walkthrough of updates to our Daily Digest email, which includes new metrics and UI improvements. With even more visibility into the health of your mobile applications, it’s easier than ever to uncover issues and take action before they get out of hand.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this post:

Overview section
Adoption section
Top crashes section
Top ANR methods section
Moments highlights section
New endpoints section

We’ll go through each part of our new Daily Digest email so you can see the information it contains, what it looks like, and why it’s important.

Overview Section

This section provides high-level metrics for tracking usage (Daily Active Users), engagement (Average Session Duration), and stability (Crash-Free Users). This update adds our App Health metric, which is calculated as the percentage of sessions that do not contain a crash or error log. It’s a great way to monitor the overall stability of your application.

As in every section in our Daily Digest email, the metrics are all clickable and will take you to the appropriate section of our dashboard. The App Health metric will take you to the Version Comparison Dashboard, where you can compare other high-level metrics by your top three versions.

Adoption Section

This section shows metrics about the adoption and health of your mobile application across your top three versions. It contains a few new pieces of data, including:

Adoption and App Health percentages by version
A graph tracking the adoption percentage by version over the last 14 days

This section provides an easy way to spot problematic releases before they affect a large percentage of your users. If the health metric drops significantly, you can pause a rollout and investigate for any new or reopened issues.

Top Crashes Section

This section contains information about the top three crashes from the previous day. The calculation is based on number of users affected by the crash and not just the number of crash events. This gives mobile teams a better indicator of the overall impact of a given crash. While this section contains the same information as our previous Daily Digest email, we’ve cleaned up the presentation to make it easier to scan.

Top ANR Methods

This section is a new addition, and it only applies for Android applications. It contains the top ANR methods as ranked by the number of users affected.

For this calculation, the ANRs are grouped by the last sample (i.e. stack trace) collected by Embrace. We approach ANRs differently from traditional monitoring solutions in that we begin capturing stack traces as soon as the main thread is blocked for 1 second. This allows you to investigate ANR data along many different criteria:

Inspect ANR Intervals (where the app eventually recovered) or ANR Exits (where the user force quit the app)
Group by the first sample or the last sample collected for a given ANR
Filter for specific ANR durations

You can read this blog post to learn more about our approach to solving ANRs. The ANR data in the Daily Digest email will guide you toward the freezes that are impacting your users the most.

Moments Highlights Section

This section is a new addition and contains helpful information about your mobile application’s startup.

The startup completion metric shows the percentage of sessions where users completed the startup and were able to use the app. A regression here could reveal the presence of failing code, network calls, or SDKs.

The cold start sessions metric is the percentage of sessions that were cold starts, meaning the app was not launched from the background. While not actionable on its own, spikes in this metric could indicate a rise in force quits prompted by frozen or failing experiences.

The 95th percentile startup time metric shows the upper bound on startup time for 95% of users. In other words, 5% of users had to wait longer than this metric to interact with the app. It’s important to track and improve upon this metric so that users can interact with your mobile app as quickly as possible.

New Endpoints Section

This section contains metrics surrounding new endpoints Embrace has detected within the mobile application. This data was already present in our Daily Digest, but we’ve updated the UI to make it easier to review.

Depending on the size of the company, new endpoints might be regularly introduced by the backend team. This summary information is a great way to immediately spot problemmatic endpoints before they have an outsized impact on the mobile experience.

And that’s it! Our Daily Digest email now has an expanded set of metrics so you have better day-to-day visibility into the health of your mobile application. You can easily track usage, adoption, stability, and performance data directly from the email, and if something deserves immediate attention, you can click directly to the relevant part of our dashboard. And if that’s not enough, we’ve also updated the design so it’s easier to take in the information you care about.

As always, please share any feedback so we can continue to build features and improvements that help your team be successful.

How Embrace Helps Mobile Teams

Embrace is a mobile data platform that provides observability, debugging, and proactive alerting for mobile teams. We are a comprehensive solution that fully reproduces every user experience from every single session. Your team gets the data it needs to proactively identify, prioritize, and solve any issue that’s costing you users or revenue.

We’re hiring for many different roles! Check out our openings and see if you’d be a good fit for our growing team!

Want to see how Embrace can help your team grow your mobile applications with best-in-class tooling and world-class support? Request a customized demo and see how we help teams set and exceed the KPIs that matter for their business!