Debug Mobile Application Issues (Remotely!!)
Dhaval Nagar / CEO
In the rapidly evolving landscape of mobile technology, ensuring the better performance of applications across a range of devices and networks is extremely important. Remote monitoring and debugging stands out as a unique technique in identifying and resolving issues that could significantly impact user experience.
This post highlights into the intricacies of remote debugging for mobile applications, offering insights into addressing common challenges and utilizing modern tools and practices.
The Vital Role of Remote Debugging
Remote debugging for mobile applications involves diagnosing and fixing issues from a distance, often in real-time. It's crucial for developers who must ensure their applications perform flawlessly across different devices, operating systems, and under various network conditions.
The complexity of mobile ecosystems, combined with the unpredictability of user interactions, necessitates a robust approach to debugging that can adapt to these dynamic environments.
Common Challenges in Remote Debugging
- Network Issues: Mobile applications are at the mercy of network conditions that fluctuate wildly. Remote debugging must account for these variations, using tools that can simulate 3G, 4G, LTE, and Wi-Fi connections with varying quality and speed to understand how network types and strength affect app performance.
- Device-Specific Bugs: The sheer variety of mobile devices, each with unique hardware configurations, screen resolutions, and OS versions, introduces a significant challenge. Emulators and simulators are invaluable for mimicking a wide range of devices, but testing on actual hardware is also essential to capture the nuances of behavior across different models.
- User Activities: The unpredictable nature of user interactions can expose unforeseen bugs. Remote debugging solutions need to include comprehensive logging and session recording features to replay and analyze unexpected user actions that may lead to issues.
- Code Bugs: As applications grow in complexity, so does the potential for bugs. Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and debugging tools must offer detailed insights into code execution, memory usage, and real-time logs to pinpoint and resolve issues efficiently.
Common Tools and Technologies
Before we delve into remote debugging, let's first review the most common tools and services that are available to Mobile Developers. It's almost certain that the application developers have used many of these already.
Emulators and Simulators: Tools like Android Studio's emulator and Apple's Xcode simulator allow developers to mimic a wide array of device configurations and OS versions, providing a cost-effective method for early-stage debugging.
Real Device Testing Platforms: Cloud-based platforms such as BrowserStack and Sauce Labs offer access to real devices, enabling more accurate testing and debugging across different hardware and software environments. Again, these platforms are used for the early-stage debugging.
Network Simulation Tools: Charles Proxy and Wireshark are examples of tools that can simulate network conditions, offering insights into how your app performs under various network speeds and types. These tools are only possible to use in private environments having control over the underlying network.
Logging and Monitoring Tools: Firebase Crashlytics and Sentry provide real-time monitoring and logging, essential for identifying, tracking, and understanding bugs as they occur in live app versions. In our opinion, Firebase Crashlytics is a must-have tool.
Cross-Platform Debugging Tools: Visual Studio Code and Chrome DevTools, among others, support remote debugging across platforms, offering a unified environment to debug web-based and hybrid mobile applications. These largely depends on the underlying technologies used to build the application. For example, it's easier to use Chrome DevTools with React Native and Ionic Framework, Flutter has it's own set of DevTools.
Most of the above tools are useful during development and testing. However, the dynamic and unpredictable nature of real-world conditions presents unique challenges for remote debugging once a mobile application is deployed to end users. For example, Wireshark will not work due to no common network, Devices are very hard to predict across geographic regions, Network can be variable based on geographies and providers.
Addressing these concerns requires slightly different approach that extends beyond the capabilities of pre-release testing environments. Here's how to adapt and tackle these real-world debugging scenarios effectively:
Remote Debugging in Production
Real User Monitoring tools are essential for tracking the actual experiences of users in production environments. Platforms like New Relic, Dynatrace, and Google Analytics offer deep insights into user behavior, app performance across different devices, operating systems, and network conditions. These tools can help identify patterns and anomalies in user interactions, providing actionable data to pinpoint and resolve issues.
Feature flagging platforms such as LaunchDarkly or Split.io enable developers to roll out new features to subsets of users selectively. This approach allows for safer deployments and easier isolation of issues in production by enabling or disabling features without deploying new code.
On-Device Logging and Crash Reporting for issues that occur in the wild, incorporating on-device logging and crash reporting tools into your application is critical. Solutions like Crashlytics, AppSpector, and Sentry offer lightweight SDKs that capture detailed error reports and logs directly from users' devices when issues occur.
Since network variability is a significant factor affecting app performance, integrating network performance monitoring into your application can provide insights into how different network conditions impact user experience. Tools like Akamai's mPulse and Cloudflare's Mobile SDK can measure real-time network speeds, latency, and connectivity failures encountered by users, guiding optimization efforts.
Our Preferred Stack
Crashlytics is our default integration for every mobile applications. For most use cases, application crash is considered to be a high priority issues, but based on our experiences, ANR (Application Not Responding) is also an equally high issue. ANRs are primarily associated with different device profiles and configurations. Crashlytics gives the detailed report on both Crashes and ANRs easily.
AppSpector is something we use for more detailed remote debugging. We have tried several other SDKs in past like BugFender and InstaBug, but our experience with AppSpector was much better with their current features.
This gives a much detailed window inside the application and you can easily check the Network requests, Local storage, Local database, etc. For some of our applications, this was a much needed solution, although in small capacity.
Below is the screenshots from two of our applications following a Feature Flag based debugging approach. Both are business applications and work with specific set of users in different industries. So instead of running this all the time, we coordinate with users and try to enable this on request basis and gather the needed detail.
Both of these applications are built using React Native, but we have used similar approach in Ionic Framework and Native applications.
Sentry needs no introduction, it's fairly popular in the JavaScript APM Eco-system. We use Sentry in both our Front-end Web Applications as well in React Native Mobile Applications. Our primarily purpose to use Sentry is to do the exception monitoring.
Exception logs include all the relevant detail needed to debug and resolve the issue.
App Crash != Device Crash. Sometimes, you need to get deeper into the device logs, to collect more information on what is happening in your device in general. For one of our Hardware-focused Android application, we had to collect more ADB Logs, Bug reports, Tombstones and few other data to diagnose the issues.
- Vysor for remote into devices.
- Bug reports to collect more detail log reports include OS and other application logs. I hope you never have to assess the Android Tombstones ;)
- Logcat Extreme to continuously collect device logs, including floating log windows for easier diagnosis. Floating log window is super useful if your application runs in Lock Mode or MDM.
- Logcat Buffers to assess and adjust various Logcat buffers.