Mobile app monitoring for iOS and Android
Track crashes, ANRs, app start time and network performance on real devices, and follow every mobile request into the backend services behind it.Why teams use Mobile App Monitoring in Obseria
Fix crashes that matter
Crashes and ANRs are grouped, symbolicated and ranked by affected users, app version and device.
Faster apps, better ratings
Measure cold and warm start, screen loads and frozen frames to find what makes your app feel slow.
End-to-end visibility
Network requests from the app carry trace context, so mobile slowness is traced to the exact backend span.
Mobile App Monitoring in three steps
- Step 1
Add the mobile SDK
Integrate the Obseria SDK for iOS or Android, or use OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation, and upload symbols from CI.
- Step 2
Capture real-device data
The SDK records crashes, ANRs, app starts, screen loads and network calls, batching data to respect battery and bandwidth.
- Step 3
Analyze by version and device
Compare releases, OS versions and device models, triage crashes in the Errors Inbox and alert on regressions.
Capabilities
- Crash reporting. Symbolicated native and managed stack traces for iOS and Android, grouped into issues.
- ANR and hang detection. Detect Application Not Responding events on Android and main-thread hangs on iOS, with thread dumps.
- App start and screen performance. Cold, warm and hot start times, screen load durations and slow or frozen frames.
- Network monitoring. Latency, error rates and payload sizes per endpoint, linked to backend traces.
- Release and device analytics. Crash-free users and sessions per app version, OS version and device model.
- User journeys. Follow session breadcrumbs, screens and actions leading up to a crash or slow interaction.
Mobile App Monitoring: what you need to know
What is mobile app monitoring?
Mobile app monitoring collects performance, stability and usage data from iOS and Android apps running on real users' devices. An SDK embedded in the app captures crashes, Application Not Responding (ANR) events, app start times, screen rendering, network requests and user journeys, and sends them to an observability platform. The goal is to understand how the app behaves across thousands of device models, OS versions, network conditions and app versions, none of which you fully control.
Mobile monitoring differs from web monitoring in important ways. Releases go through app stores and users update slowly, so several versions run in parallel for months. Crashes terminate the whole app. Battery, memory and connectivity vary widely. And a bad experience often ends in an uninstall or a one-star review rather than a support ticket.
Why mobile app monitoring matters
For many businesses the mobile app is the primary customer channel. Stability and speed directly affect retention, store ratings and revenue, and app stores also consider stability signals. Yet mobile teams often work with limited visibility: a crash report without context, or a backend dashboard that cannot tell which requests came from which app version.
- Prioritize stability work: crash-free rates per version show whether a release is healthy enough to roll out further.
- Catch regressions early: staged rollouts become safer when crash and ANR rates are compared against the previous version in real time.
- Improve perceived speed: app start time and screen loads shape the first impression more than any feature.
- Bridge mobile and backend teams: shared traces end the debate over whether a slowdown is caused by the app or the API.
Key mobile metrics: crashes, ANRs and app start
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Crash-free users and sessions | Share of users or sessions without a crash, per app version |
| ANR rate (Android) and hangs (iOS) | How often the main thread is blocked long enough to freeze the UI |
| Cold, warm and hot start time | How long it takes from launch until the first screen is usable |
| Screen load time | Time to render a screen with its content after navigation |
| Slow and frozen frames | Rendering smoothness during scrolling and animations |
| Network latency and errors | Response times and failure rates per endpoint and connection type |
Look at these metrics per app version, OS version and device class. An ANR spike limited to low-memory Android devices points to a different fix than a crash affecting all users of the latest release.
Mobile app monitoring with Obseria
The Obseria SDKs for iOS and Android capture crashes, ANRs and hangs, app start phases, screen loads, frozen frames and network calls. Data is batched and sent efficiently to respect battery and bandwidth. Crashes are symbolicated using the debug symbols you upload from CI and grouped into issues in the Errors Inbox, where they can be assigned, resolved and tracked for regressions together with backend and web errors.
Every network request from the app carries trace context, so a slow API call on a mobile device links to its distributed trace across your backend services. Mobile events are stored in Obseria Lake next to traces, logs and metrics, and Obseria Pipeline masks personal data at ingest. You can query with OQL to compare releases, build SLOs on crash-free sessions or app start time, and let Obseria Intelligence correlate a crash spike with a backend deployment or feature flag change.
Mobile monitoring best practices
- Upload symbols automatically in your build pipeline for every release, otherwise crash reports remain unreadable.
- Use staged rollouts and compare crash and ANR rates of the new version against the previous one before going to 100 percent.
- Measure cold start separately and set a budget for it, since it is the slowest and most visible start type.
- Keep heavy work off the main thread and use ANR and hang data to find violations in production.
- Add breadcrumbs for key actions so crash reports show what the user did before the failure.
- Segment by device class and network type to understand performance for users on older hardware and slower connections.
Frequently asked questions
Obseria supports native iOS and Android apps. Mobile data appears alongside web RUM, backend traces and logs on the same platform.
ANR stands for Application Not Responding. Android reports it when the app's main thread is blocked for too long, for example by disk or network I/O, and the user sees a dialog offering to close the app. Obseria detects ANRs and captures thread information to help find the blocking code.
You upload debug symbols, such as dSYM files for iOS and mapping files for Android, from your CI pipeline. Obseria uses them to symbolicate stack traces into readable function names and line numbers.
Yes. Network requests from the app carry trace context, so each mobile request links to its distributed trace through your backend services.
The SDK batches and compresses data and sends it efficiently in the background to minimize impact on battery, bandwidth and app performance.
Ready for observability that delivers answers?
Try every feature free for 14 days, no credit card and no proprietary agents.