Feature Flags Product Tour

Feature flagging is an indispensable part of modern mobile app development that allows teams to minimize the risks associated with releasing new features and experiences. Feature flags allow mobile teams to simultaneously deliver multiple variants of their apps and give them the ability to roll back any changes without the need for an app update, enabling them to rapidly iterate without negatively impacting the user experience.

As feature flags become a staple of your app development process, it becomes critical to keep an eye on their individual stability, performance, and user experience. This data adds a crucial perspective to the product and business performance of your feature flags, helping you understand the why behind the numbers.

In this post, we’ll walk you through Instabug’s Feature Flags and how it can help you keep track of the performance of your app variants and quickly identify any issues that affect their user experience.

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To start receiving feature flag stability and performance data, you’ll first need to add your feature flags by calling our Feature Flags API. Feature flags can either be boolean with only true/false values, or multivariate with several different variations being delivered.

Feature flags must be distinct from each other with unique names and you can create up to 600 feature flags. You can also remove feature flags at any time through the API or even clear all feature flags.

Learn more about instrumenting Feature Flags in our docs.

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Once you set up your feature flags, Instabug automatically tracks the stability and performance of your feature flags and their variants, giving you a comprehensive view of their performance. To view your feature flag performance, select Feature Flags from the navigation menu on your dashboard.

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Feature Flags dashboard

The Feature Flags page lists all the feature flags you’ve added along with some high-level metrics to help you gauge their performance at a glance and quickly identify underperforming features. Here you can see the feature flag’s type, Apdex, crash-free session rate, and crash-free user rate.

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You can also filter your feature flags by date, app version, and name to easily surface the performance insights you need.

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Feature flag details

Selecting a feature flag from the list takes you to its details page where you can dig deeper into its performance. Here you can get a comprehensive view of the feature flag’s overall performance or use filters to zoom in on specific dates or app versions.

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Feature flag insights

This section includes the flag’s Apdex, crash-free session rate, crash-free user rate, total sessions, forced restart-free rate, and app hang-free rate for each variant. Boolean flags also include the percent difference between the two variants.

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Selecting any metric from the list will take you to its details page with pre-applied applied filters for the chosen variant and time period where you can drill down further and quickly identify issues and their root cause.

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Crashes

In this section you can see all fatal and non-fatal stability issues that occurred on this feature flag as well as their team, occurrences, affected users, and the time they were last seen.

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The issues are divided into three tabs:

• Crashes: displays all reported stability issues.
• Introduced crashes: displays issues that first occurred on this feature flag.
• Exclusive crashes: displays issues that only occurred on this feature flag.

Additionally, you can filter issues by variant or issue type to get a more nuanced view of their stability.

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In addition to the Feature Flags dashboard, you can track feature flag performance across Crash Reporting and App Performance Monintoring.

By default, feature flags are one of the dimensions displayed in the patterns section across crashes, app hangs, UI hangs, forced restarts, and cold app launch. Individual occurrences performance issues also list all enabled feature flags in their details.

Additionally, you can use filters to investigate the performance of specific feature flags for all the previously mentioned issues and their occurrences.

This level of granularity provides invaluable data to inform your decisions, enabling you to accurately evaluate app variants based on actual user experience. 

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Gaining visibility over the performance of your feature flags is only half the battle. Now you need to ensure that you are alerted to emerging issues and automatically take action to mitigate their impact.

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With Instabug’s alerts and rules, you can get immediate alerts when a feature flag falls below specified stability and performance thresholds and automatically assign them to the relevant team and team member to take action.

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Instabug's Feature Flags help you unlock the true power of your feature flags by giving you complete visibility over their stability, performance, and user experience and automating your response when issues emerge. Now you can confidently rollout new features, rapidly test and iterate, and make data-driven decisions without having to worry about the risks that come with releasing new experiences.