Hanson Ho and David Rifkin, Embrace
Do you include telemetry from mobile apps when assessing the health and performance of your application? If not, do you know what you might be missing?
Like when users can’t connect to your servers because their network connection is poor, or something failed on the device before a request could be sent to complete an order? And what about everything in the app before creation of a network request – context that's hard or impossible to derive from the request itself – and can explain WHY requests are so slow, but only in Japan?
How are you thinking about the telemetry that comes from your mobile app? Learning to make sense of the gaps, and work around them, is the best path to reliable mobile applications. We’ll discuss how user experience is the best anchoring mechanism for mobile observability, and how reliability ultimately is in the eyes of the app-holder.
Hanson Ho's niche is mobile observability and performance, an odd passion he developed while working at Twitter as Android Performance Tech Lead. He is now at Embrace, hoping to bring true observability 2.0 to mobile apps everywhere, one device at a time.
David Rifkin is a developer relations engineer at Embrace, a mobile developer by trade, always an educator at heart. He has built iOS applications in a variety of settings and team sizes. OpenTelemetry components have become his new Legos.
author = {Hanson Ho and David Rifkin},
title = {{{\textquotedblleft}How{\textquoteright}s} the App {Doing?{\textquotedblright}} Bringing Mobile Into Your Reliability Picture},
year = {2025},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}