The challenge in reproducing mobile app bugs

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0 min read

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Mobile apps live in their own exclusive world. That is, inside someone’s mobile phone which is so personal a gadget to them. This throws some unique challenges to the mobile app developer. Unlike server-side applications, where the environment is a controlled one and is accessible to developer, mobile apps are almost inaccessible to the developer unless (s)he plants enough mechanism in the app to notify as and when issues occur.

A popular mobile app faced such an issue some time back. One (not so) fine morning, they started getting calls from their users complaining that one of the features is not working. Their developer tried hard to reproduce the problem, but failed. And only after two weeks, he could identify a pattern. All the users who had this issue were from a particular country. Digging further, he figured out that one of the third party services the app was using was failing.

After following up with the third party service, they finally got the issue sorted. It turned out that the third party service API was blocked by the ISP in that country. Had they known that particular data point, in this case the location where the issues were reported from, they could have saved precious fourteen man days. When we pitched fi.notes. to them, they could immediately relate to the problem we are trying to solve. And they became one of our early adoptors.

Visit us at finotes.com to know more about how we can help you fix bugs in your live mobile apps.