Just like that Mobile March Madness 2021 is almost in our rearview. Before we look to April, let’s recap some of our most notable mobile updates from this past month with a few tips on how to solve what matters faster and a sneak peek of what’s coming next. That’s right. We’re constantly improving our mobile monitoring solution independent of our alliteration-based marketing campaigns.
Like many companies, Sentry uses feature flags to determine when certain users see certain features. Recently, we decided to switch our feature flag software to an open-source system called Flagr. And while implementing Flagr, we used our new Performance tools to find — and ultimately fix — a serious issue in how we were fetching our flags.
Android is arguably the most ubiquitous operating system in the world. Whether it’s a tablet, phone, folding phone, computer, TV, or IoT device, chances are you’ve interacted with Android OS. And to help developers get full visibility into how their customers experience Android’s myriad applications, we’re extending Performance to Android.
Like many companies, we have a Hack Week at Sentry. In 2017, we coded an app which blared entrance music for anyone who stepped foot in our office. In 2019, we encouraged folks to be nice on the Internet. Noble causes, sure, but for this year’s Hack Week I was determined to advance a cause near and dear to my cold British heart: dark mode.
March Mobile Madness continues with Performance support for React Native. Our friend, Jenn Meung shares how Performance supports his mobile appliction. In addition to working with Sentry, I also contribute to Tour, a travel app which helps people plan trips with a drag-and-drop interface. Because Tour is built with React Native, we’ve always had issues accurately gauging how people use our app and its performance.
One of Sentry’s most-trafficked pages is our issue details page, as it helps our customers understand the root cause an error. For those of you who are new to Sentry, we define an issue as a group of similar events. To render the issue details, a significant amount of data needs to be fetched — counts, charts, event details, and other metadata. The two main components on this page are the latest event, and summary statistics.
This month we’re updating several of our mobile SDKs. You might think it’s madness… Mobile March Madness. First up is Flutter. It’s fair to say that all of us have had a bad mobile experience which frustrated us enough to warrant switching apps. Getting the experience right requires a lot of work due to the variety of OSes, screen sizes and orientations.
In January we brought Release Health to JavaScript. This month we’ve been thinking about the overall experience for JavaScript developers, some could call it JavaScript Jebruary. Think back to your last frustrating experience. It was probably caused by slow page loads or getting dizzy from staring at the ever-ending spinner. One survey showed that the average desktop load time on a webpage was 10.3 seconds and on mobile, it was 27.3 seconds.
In the software lifecycle, you need to know what is affecting the customer from your frontend code to your underlying infrastructure. However, no one to date has solved for monitoring the health of software code vs. systems at the level that we have taken on — or at the scale that our customers require, as everything from grocery shopping to gaming is now digital.
Everyone’s software crashes. As an engineer, you don’t feel your users’ frustration unless they reach out to customer support, write bad reviews, or tweet about it. This feedback is often lacking relevant information to resolve the issue. In some cases, you can re-engage with the customer, but that process is time-consuming and inefficient. Another option would be to examine the crash reports, but sometimes they don’t give sufficient insight to fix the problem.
