What's New at Instabug: Spring 2023 Product Updates

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At Instabug, we’re dedicated to helping mobile teams deliver world-class app experiences. That’s why we’re excited to introduce our Spring launch, which includes new features to help developers identify and solve mobile-specific issues, like ANRs and user terminations. This season’s updates include some of the most impactful features we’ve ever launched. They are all laser focused on helping mobile teams balance stability, performance, and feature development throughout the entire development lifecycle.  

This Spring, we’re excited to announce:

• Deeper visibility of the mobile user experience with support for app hangs, user terminations and incident details.
• Simplified error reproduction, including a new flame graph engine to visualize stack traces leading up to an Application Not Responding (ANR) error.
• Streamlined performance management workflow with a new dashboard for monitoring screen performance and incidents list page for triaging all incoming quality alerts.
• Improved release confidence with an improved release monitoring dashboard and version comparisons so you can track and act on performance vitals.

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"We're thrilled to announce our Spring launch at Instabug, which includes a suite of new features designed to help mobile teams deliver world-class app experiences. Our mission has always been to empower developers with the tools they need to create the best possible mobile apps. With this launch, we're taking a significant leap forward in that mission.” —Kenny Johnston, VP of Product at Instabug

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Mobile apps come with performance situations that don’t exist on the web, such as app hangs and ANR errors, which are difficult to detect and solve without mobile-specific tools (learn more about how mobile and web development differ). Our latest features build on Instabug’s ability to provide a clear picture of exactly what your users experience, with the context needed to prioritize and fix issues.

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App hangs

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The new app hangs feature tracks when your main thread is blocked for longer than three seconds. To help you identify patterns, app hangs are grouped by screen. You can use all of our other debugging tools, such as stacktraces, logs, and repro steps to troubleshoot app hangs.

Explore app hangs in the sandbox or learn more in our docs.

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Frustrated user terminations

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Instabug now tracks frustrated user terminations and helps you discover why users are restarting your app. When a user closes and reopens the app within five seconds, it will be reported as a frustrated user termination.

Explore user terminations in the sandbox or learn more in our docs.

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Custom crash grouping

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Instabug already groups your related crashes together using mobile specific insights. We know this may not apply to all use cases—sometimes you might want more or less granularity, or to blacklist certain traces from a group. This release gives you the ability to create custom crash grouping rules based on your needs.

Learn more about using custom grouping in our docs for iOS and Android.

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More features to understand exactly what your users experience:

• Capture background ANR errors.
• Track and debug backend database queries.
• Support for warm app launches for Android apps.
• Spans breakdown for hot app launches.

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Mobile apps run in challenging environments—diverse devices, platforms, and conditions—and Instabug helps you identify and reproduce issues quickly and accurately. Instabug already has out-of-the-box support for detail-rich logs and repro steps. Our newest features make it even easier for mobile teams to reproduce issues, identify root causes, and debug quickly.

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Flame graph engine

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Application Not Responding (ANR) errors are common and solving them is critical to improving your app experience, but debugging them is difficult and time-consuming if you’re manually comparing stack traces. To simplify debugging ANRs, we’ve added a flame graph engine to help you visualize stack traces and identify code paths that commonly lead to ANRs.

Reach out to support to have this feature enabled or learn more in our docs.

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Screenshots in repro steps with auto-masking API

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Instabug already supports repro steps for bugs and crashes, but sometimes more context can help you reconstruct what happened. Instabug now supports capturing screenshots in Crash Reporting repro steps. To protect your users’ privacy, we’ve also added an API to automatically mask sensitive information in screenshots.

Learn more about screenshots in repro steps and auto-masking in our docs.

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The fastest way to five-star performance is for mobile engineering teams to adopt a performance-first mindset to balance technical quality and feature development. We’ve made it easier for mobile teams to communicate, stay organized, and take action to resolve critical issues throughout the entire app lifecycle.

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Screen performance dashboard

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Now you can see all the performance metrics for each screen in your app, collected in one dashboard. This enables you to immediately identify, target, and prioritize issues impacting your team’s most important screens.

Explore the screen performance dashboard in our sandbox or learn more in our docs.

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Incident list page

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The all-new incident list page brings you a consolidated view of all stability and performance incidents. Now you can see all of the alerts fired by your app and their details in a single view to help your team compare, prioritize, and take the next steps towards resolution.

Explore the incident list in our sandbox or learn more about the incidents list in our docs.

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More features to simplify your workflow:

• Jira integration enhancements with new two-way sync for issue priority field; one-way sync for comments and tags.
• Metadata for alerts and rules so you can see vital details from your main dashboard.
• Easily reorder your user-facing Bug Reporting menu with drag and drop categories.

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Instabug provides out-of-the-box release management features for version-specific performance visibility. Real-time monitoring, trend viewing, direct comparisons, and metric insights allow your team to pinpoint issues, track performance, and monitor adoption rates. With this release, your team can release new versions with even greater confidence while ensuring high-quality app performance.

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New alert types

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Performance alerts keep your team informed of emerging issues, so we’ve added new alert types to cover even more situations. You can now automate alerts and notification forwarding for specific app version crashes and performance and overall crash-free sessions.

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CodePush support for React Native

CodePush enables React Native developers to update Javascript code without the need to release a new version. With the addition of CodePush support, Instabug now captures and reports the CodePush version issues occur on.

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More additions to make release monitoring easier:

• New top & latest release filters in APM and Crash Reporting
• Receive a new release email when a new version starts getting adopted
• New adoption trend chart for releases and app overview pages
• Latest release widget in app overview page

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All features included in our Spring launch are available on SDK version 11.10.2 or higher.
Explore your new dashboard now →

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We are confident that this season’s updates will make it easier than ever to deliver exceptional mobile experiences, but we’re not done. We’re already hard at work on more big and exciting features to level-up your app performance. Stay tuned!