Komoot: How Germany's No.1 Outdoor App Built It's App Using Instabug + Trello

Komoot, the award-winning app that is consistently ranked No.1 in the German App Store is helping over 4 million cyclists, mountain bikers and hikers plan better outdoor routes. As Europe’s leading outdoor app, it enables millions of bikers and hikers worldwide to experience more of the outdoors and enjoy nature. With recommending personalized tours, planning trips in details with guidance from the app, sharing inspiring experiences with friends worldwide, Komoot has made outdoor activities accessible and fun for everyone.

Komoot was founded in 2010 by a group of 6 outdoor enthusiasts, the majority of whom hail from the Austrian Alps. Since then, they've been growing to 30 employees and freelance editors to deliver a top-notch experience to their activity-seeking customers. We had the chance to chat with Daniel Grad, co-founder and mobile lead, about how they build, maintain and grow their top-rated app which is available for iOS, Android and web, as well as for Apple Watch, Android Wear and Samsung Gear smartwatches.

Tell us more about your release cycle & tech stack?

We don't have fixed release cycles but we do release based on the projects we have, which translates into every few weeks. It's typically anywhere between 2 weeks to 2 months but really it depends on the projects. We mainly use Trello to organize projects, Google Tools for presentations and sheets, CI like Jenkins, HockeyApp to push beta versions to our beta testers, and Instabug to receive feedback from testers in-app.

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How do you test your app?

For Komoot, we decided that our team is the best beta testers we can have. Focused a lot on beta testing within the team. Everybody is using the app already so it was perfect for us to have the team as our dedicated beta testers. We have an external beta testing program on TestFlight and Android Beta but we're not pushing it heavily. We send Usability tests to external users to see how they understand the app and features but we mainly focus on feedback from our internal team. 

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Was there a specific challenge facing you while collecting feedback?

When we started developing Komoot we were all in the same office so it was easier to tell each other any feedback. Now that we grew and are working remotely, it became especially hard to just go over to the developer and talk to him/her. Over the years, we started experimenting with different tools, started sharing screenshots via email and Trello which only worked half of the time and wasn't very stable. One day, one of our developers talked to the team about having a stable tool that enables them to take screenshots, insert details, and grabs contextual information to help debug and share feedback more efficiently. 

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How did Instabug help with feedback collection?

We gave Instabug a try three years ago and has been using it since then as everybody liked the way of just taking screenshots and pressing send after writing one sentence of information. It also gave us the chance to mark things on screenshots, go so deep into the system and grab important information, sending these reports directly to Trello. It's quite super stable and really helps us a lot in getting the bugs to a place where we manage them.

It takes a lot of time to get your team to send quality feedback as you spend a while discussing what went wrong and trying to remember what went wrong improved  by using Instabug, the people could send and the context is already there and the explanation is not a lot of people don't have to talk much and it went way quicker which made the quality even higher than before. The time of discussing things got cut drastically as we don't need to talk to the tester who reported the bug as we get all the information we could possible. Time spent on discussing bugs has been shifted to fixing bugs as it became 10x quicker.

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Can you tell us more about your Trello + Instabug integration? ‍

We rely heavily on Trello for project management and bug tracking for all our teams where they receive feedback on their own boards. iOS and Android teams have their own boars where they organize it based on their own workflow. What's common though is that they have columns where they add feedback and bugs and act according to the priority of the feedback and the release urgency.

What's also really interesting is that Komoot's team can get more details about the bug or feedback by going back to Instabug's dashboard with just a click in Trello, This enables the development teams to dive deeper into important bugs and feedback without disrupting their existing workflow since Komoot team keeps everything in Trello.Daniel also mentioned that one of Instabug's feature that they rely on is the custom data sent with the reported bugs right inside Trello. They are gathering additional data which is super relevant for Komoot like which tours are currently displayed on a given map and what routes their users have been on at that specific moment in time. Being able to see these details with one click on Trello, allows them to do all the heavy lifting from one place.

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What's next for Komoot?

Since we're a one-app company which very features rich, we're focusing on retouching and enhancing the old features. For the international markets, we really focus on data and what our key users are currently doing at the moment to build more features that could cater these markets.