Curve uses Embrace to eliminate app freezes affecting 40% of first-time user experiences

Curve is a digital wallet that empowers users to maximize rewards from their credit cards. Users can choose how they earn rewards, streamline how they pay by combining cards into one smart Curve debit card, switch charges from one card to another, and see a categorized breakdown of their spending across all their cards.

As a mobile-first company, Curve must deliver seamless mobile experiences to ensure customer satisfaction in the highly competitive Fintech space. Curve needed a solution to help it identify and solve issues resulting in negative user and business outcomes.

With Embrace’s unified mobile monitoring and observability platform, Curve has achieved the following results:

• Eliminated app freezes impacting 40% of first-time user experiences.
• Successfully achieved 95% of code migration without introducing regressions.
• Created shared alerts that connect mobile and backend teams for faster issue discovery.

Founded in 2015 by Shachar Bialick, Curve is on a quest to give people a more straightforward and innovative way to manage their finances. In pursuit of this mission, Bialick created a one-of-a-kind digital wallet that maximizes credit card rewards and provides extra cashback when people spend with their Curve card.

Accessing your virtual wallet on the go is an essential feature for Curve users. In addition, the Curve card is designed to make it easier for users to manage their spending, seamlessly linking existing cards to repay each purchase automatically.

Curve noticed a drop in users that coincided with an app freeze. This freeze occurred for 40% of first-time users during the final onboarding step. That meant many users invested time creating an account, only to immediately face a freeze or crash. This problem, if left unaddressed, would be a constant source of user churn.

With Embrace, they uncovered the root cause, which was incredibly complex. The app was freezing during an animation; however, the animation overlapped with the data synchronization required to save a new user account. This meant the freeze could be caused by either, or a combination, of these events.

Curve originally built its app in Objective-C in 2015. However, as the company and mobile team have grown, the legacy codebase has slowed their ability to innovate and troubleshoot issues quickly.

They needed a mobile monitoring solution that could help them successfully migrate their codebase to Swift without impacting users or their business. With Embrace, they have the visibility necessary to test different app versions before release.

Curve relies on Embrace’s Custom Dashboards to track essential performance and stability metrics. In particular, version comparison dashboards help them quickly compare the performance of new app versions to previous ones and easily spot regressions.

Embrace saves the Curve mobile team countless developer hours that would otherwise be spent painstakingly testing every possible app version on every device type. Instead, Curve successfully migrated 95% of their code to Swift with minimal disruption to users or the business.

Prior to Embrace, Curve’s mobile team had zero visibility into networking issues because their alerting was limited to backend systems. As a result, the mobile and backend teams knew they needed a better system to notify both teams of errors and outages.

With Embrace Alerts, the mobile team now has visibility into network errors (e.g., 400s and 500s) that exceed their custom thresholds. They can respond proactively and work with the backend team to quickly resolve incidents.

The Curve mobile team is no longer left unaware of networking issues that cause frustrating user experiences. They are actively expanding alerts to other critical use cases, allowing them to proactively address issues before they affect the end-user experience.

With Embrace, Curve has every tool they need to ensure their app is successful now and as they work to further improve their user experience in the upcoming years. In fact, Curve is using insights from Embrace to identify and prioritize areas of optimization within their offerings.

For example, Curve previously wanted to reduce their application memory usage. However, they lacked the necessary data to prioritize this engineering work.

Customers choose innovative Fintech solutions because they want a seamless way to digitally manage their financial transactions. When these mobile experiences have friction, it’s a surefire way to lose customer confidence and churn users to competitors. As mobile apps become more sophisticated, the tools needed to monitor and improve their performance must keep pace. Curve had a lot of room for improvement before switching away from traditional mobile monitoring tools.

Embrace provides high-fidelity observability data in a single platform, empowering your organization to identify blind spots and build a more robust, profitable app like Curve. Learn how Embrace can help you deliver better mobile experiences with deep user session insights by starting a free trial today.