Instabug vs AppDynamics

In this post, we will take a look at two of the top mobile app quality platforms out there, Instabug vs AppDynamics. These tools can help you monitor your app’s performance and crashes, as well as errors, network requests, battery consumption, and more.

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The worst-case scenario that can affect user experience is their session ending as a result of a crash or error. Both Instabug and AppDynamics help you avoid negative reviews with detailed crash reporting directly from your mobile app. With both, you will have full-stack monitoring on a large range of mobile platforms. On your dashboard, you will receive real-time updates and event alerts via email.

To accelerate workflow, both support a vast suite of third-party integrations such as Jira, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, and much more. This allows for seamless integration into existing workflows.

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Built for mobile

While AppDynamics is built with backend and DevOps teams in mind, Instabug understands the unique challenges of mobile development and is built for mobile developers and engineers. Instabug detects all issues affecting your users, whether it is a crash, slow network call, slow transition, or UI hang. Additionally, Instabug helps you track your overall user experience with the "apdex" metric that can serve as the north star of your performance optimization efforts

With strong mobile experience, Instabug’s APM goes a lot deeper. App launch time monitoring, whether cold, warm, or hot, helps you set a good first impression which is key with mobile users. You will also be able to track UI hangs and make sure users aren’t frustrated with your app. Custom app trace monitoring also provides a lot of flexibility with tracking the performance of specific logic and code traces.

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Reproduce and fix issues faster with better crash reporting

The most important part of a crash reporting tool is being able to detect and diagnose a wide range of crashes. While AppDynamics only supports traditional handled and unhandled exceptions, Instabug supports all crash types that you might encounter to ensure that any error is quickly identifiable. This includes:

• Out Of Memory (OOM) errors on mobile (OOM errors happen on avg ~5x more than normal crashes).
• Application Not Responding (ANR) on Android
• NDK crash detection
• iOS-specific crashes such as C++ Exceptions and SwiftUI Exception.
• Network Crashes: Crashes due to Network errors (4xx, 5xx, and slow requests)

Instabug also gives you more information beyond just the crash. The conditions that led up to the crash are key to figuring out and fixing the issue. The session profiler captures the state and timeline of the device (memory, CPU, battery, and connectivity) in the last 60 seconds before the app crashes. Another useful feature is repro steps, which replay the interactions a user makes with your app up until a crash is reported grouped by each screen name.

You can even take it a step further with powerful filtering across all data points of reported errors including custom key-value attributes. Instabug also supports filtering on feature flags and experiments (A/B tests) to help new features meet your standards for stability before they reach all of your users.

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Best-in-class bug reporting

Instabug offers the most powerful bug reporting tool for mobile apps on the market. With Instabug’s bug reporting features, your users can easily report bugs that don’t actually crash the app with a simple shake of their phone. For each bug report, Instabug captures a screenshot and lets your users annotate it or add more screenshots or a video recording to explain further. Instabug also automatically captures all the device and environment details, console logs, network logs, user attributes, repro steps, and session profiler to help you quickly reproduce and fix the bug.

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Advanced and fully customizable alerts and notifications

Instabug helps you stay on top of incoming issues with a powerful and fully customizable rules engine that allows you to create custom alerts and notifications for virtually any scenario. This will help you keep track of emerging issues and understand their impact on your users as well as enable you to quickly any regressing issues.

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Support for React Native and Flutter

React Native and Flutter are hands down the most popular and powerful cross-platform technologies for mobile app developers, and as a mobile-first tool, Instabug supports them with a full feature set.