adidas Runtastic deploys fixes twice as fast with Embrace

adidas Runtastic is a mobile health and fitness company founded in Austria in 2009. Acquired by adidas in 2015, adidas Runtastic’s two main offerings are mobile apps: adidas Running and adidas Training. With tens of millions of downloads across Android and iOS, adidas Runtastic’s mission is to help its users live healthier and more active lives, by giving them what they need to track activities, boost performance, and celebrate success in their fitness journey.

Fitness apps are incredibly complex. They have to collect and synchronize data across devices and wearables, accommodate a variety of user inputs, and are often used as much in the background as in the foreground. adidas Runtastic needed a solution that could provide their mobile team with high-fidelity mobile data for faster issue identification and resolution, and to help them maintain speed and quality in their bi-weekly release cycles.

With Embrace, adidas Runtastic never needs to worry about data tied to critical issues getting sampled out of view. The comprehensive, actionable insights they get from Embrace help them proactively address issues, deploy fixes twice as fast, maintain release velocity, and enhance New Relic alerts and reporting.

Acquired by adidas in 2015, adidas Runtastic is the magic behind popular health and fitness apps adidas Running and adidas Training, available for Android and iOS. While adidas Running is rather self-explanatory, adidas Training is focused on high-intensity interval training, or HIIT. Both apps come packed with modern fitness tracking features, including the ability to pair wearable devices, a variety of ways to review and analyze your workout data, and even social features like live events and a feed for sharing your wins with other users.

adidas Training takes the fitness journey to the next level with a workout creator, training plans, and more than 180 exercises and workouts that range from 7-45 min in length.

Since adidas Runtastic was founded in 2009, more than 60 million users have downloaded their Android app, with millions more flocking to their iOS counterpart.

Prior to Embrace, adidas Runtastic relied on their backend team’s preferred tech — New Relic — for their mobile needs. As an end-to-end observability platform, mobile is just a small piece of what New Relic does and, as a result, fell short of what the adidas Runtastic mobile team needed to maintain and improve their apps’ performance. More specifically, because New Relic relies on logging and sampled mobile data, it forced adidas Runtastic’s mobile team into a reactive state.

The adidas Runtastic team faced challenges with issue identification and reproducing the root cause due to the sampled mobile data provided by New Relic. This made the process of identifying and resolving issues difficult and time-consuming, as it was not easy to replicate a user’s experience.

The digital health and fitness space is huge, with some projections putting the industry’s net revenues for 2023 at more than $29B. With no shortage of options on mobile app stores, including from internationally known fitness brands like adidas, expectations for user experience are sky high.

For apps like adidas Runtastic’s, that means the margin for error is exceedingly small and, when things break, users demand immediate fixes.

With Embrace’s high-fidelity user data, adidas Runtastic can now deploy fixes twice as fast as when they relied on New Relic alone.

One of the most common causes for delay in issue remediation occurs when legacy monitoring solutions require teams to add logs and release a new version of their app, just to gain visibility on the issues at hand. For a team like adidas Runtastic that maintains a bi-weekly release cycle, that means any fix is four weeks away, at minimum.

However, since Embrace provides 90% of insights out of the box, without any additional implementation, adidas Runtastic can immediately identify the root cause and get a fix out in a two-week sprint.

Data sync issues are a good example of complex issues that frustrate users and are both difficult and time-consuming to debug. For mobile apps like adidas Runtastic’s, data syncs include collecting GPS and accelerometer data from mobile devices, and even more data from wearables like a Garmin or Apple Watch.

Anyone who’s used a fitness tracker knows how frustrating it can be when you’ve completed a run or workout, only for that data to be unusable due to a data syncing issue. For athletes and power users, it can be reason enough to switch apps.

So when adidas Runtastic heard of some users struggling with data sync issues, they quickly implemented a New Relic log to try and track the issue.

Once the adidas Runtastic team got access to Embrace data, they went from a bare bones understanding of the issue, to having clear data on scope and the root cause as well.

Unlike mobile monitoring platforms that rely on logging and breadcrumbs, Embrace provides 90% of reporting capabilities out of the box. This is because Embrace collects unsampled mobile telemetry from every user experience (e.g., user flows, ANRs, push, background, webviews, extensions, network, and offline data). Mobile teams automatically get key performance dashboards, and can completely customize their own in as little as a few clicks.

This gives developers an advantage, by providing them with a superior platform for QAing release candidates.

adidas Runtastic organizes their release cycles in two week sprints. It’s a process that predates Embrace and started when the mobile team was still reliant on New Relic’s limited mobile data. While the process hasn’t changed much, the improved efficiency and reliability of the process cannot be denied.

The improved data adidas Runtastic gets from Embrace has been eye-opening for the entire organization, and has been critical to catch bugs that often would go unnoticed until users came across them in the wild.

Where New Relic excels is at backend observability, and for that, they are still adidas Runtastic’s go-to platform. And while the mobile team is the primary beneficiary of Embrace’s superior mobile data, it’s not something that they’ve isolated from the rest of the org.

In fact, adidas Runtastic has found a unique way to get the best of both worlds by taking advantage of Embrace’s New Relic integration.

By integrating the two platforms, Embrace automatically sends high-fidelity mobile data directly to the New Relic platform that can be used in dashboards and alerting.

Leveraging Embrace data to improve alerting is another way adidas Runtastic is getting more proactive with Embrace. But it’s not the only way they’re leveraging high-fidelity mobile data to improve and augment the insights they get out of New Relic.

Leveraging Embrace data to improve alerting is another way adidas Runtastic is getting more proactive with Embrace. But it’s not the only way they’re leveraging high-fidelity mobile data to improve and augment the insights they get out of New Relic.

With stiff competition from international brands, at-home fitness disruptors, and even tech giants like Apple and Google, adidas Runtastic can’t afford to provide a good-enough experience. In their eyes, turning to Embrace has provided them with a competitive advantage.

The struggle of resource constraints isn’t new or unique to adidas Runtastic. Many mobile teams simply can’t afford to divert development hours away from innovation toward the manual, time-consuming process of issue reproduction. Especially when the scope of that issue is hard to determine due to a lack of data.

But with Embrace, that’s become a false choice. With the ability to instantly look up any user session, reproducing an issue is as fast as you can navigate the platform.

It’s led to a shift in the way adidas Runtastic thinks about app health and stability. And, it’s a key reason why both engineering leaders at adidas Runtastic start every day with their app health digest from Embrace.

With Embrace, adidas Runtastic has a better understanding of their app’s health and stability, can more quickly identify and resolve issues before they hit production, and can be more efficient in how they spend their mobile team’s limited resources. The unprecedented level of detail they get out of Embrace’s mobile data has further improved existing systems, increased their release velocity, and improved app performance, putting adidas Runtastic in a better position to attract and retain new users.

To learn how Embrace can help you improve app performance, identify and resolve critical issues, and improve your mobile team’s efficiency, sign up for free today.