Winter 2024 Updates: Adopt a User-Centric Process to Elevate Your App

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Instabug’s commitment to empowering mobile teams to deliver five-star apps across the entire mobile app lifecycle extends even further this Winter. We’re bringing mobile teams actionable feedback from user surveys, confidence in their feature rollouts, automated app store rollouts, and much more.

Before we dig into the details, we're delighted to share that our dedication to mobile innovation and excellence has once again received top honors from G2 with several new badges, solidifying our leadership in key categories essential for large-scale mobile teams. These accolades are a reflection of our team's relentless effort and the invaluable relationship we have with our customers and partners.

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Without further ado, let's start unveiling the new products and features that will help you elevate your app and achieve mobile success.

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Monitoring product and performance data is crucial to understanding your users’ in-app actions and the quality of their experience. Still, by nature, this quantitative data can struggle to uncover how your users feel and what they think of your app. Revealing these thoughts and emotions requires you to add qualitative data through direct user feedback to your arsenal.

Whether you’re evaluating the performance of a beta version or trying to understand your app’s user experience in production, one of the best things you can do is ask. 55% of users will be happy to share their feedback.

Instabug’s In-App Surveys enables mobile teams to put their data into context by unlocking a seamless, low-friction approach to gathering feedback directly from users. Moreover, Instabug links user responses with their app sessions, enabling you to view the exact user experience behind their feedback and understand its impact.

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Keep a finger on the pulse of your users

NPS and app rating surveys give you the power to quickly reveal user satisfaction with your app, helping you identify happy and frustrated users. For more detailed feedback, custom surveys allow you to better understand your users by asking them specific questions to guide your roadmap.

To gather targeted feedback and boost response rates, you can target your surveys at specific users based on user attributes or email, and choose exactly when the survey will be displayed in their journey.

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Understand the app experience behind user feedback

Instabug enables you to combine quantitative and qualitative data by giving you the power to replay a respondent’s app sessions. With Session Replay, you can view and replay all the user sessions associated with a survey response to reveal the actual app experience behind their feedback.

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Boost your app store ratings by prompting happy users

After users respond to your NPS or app rating survey, you can prompt happy users to rate your app on the app store to help you boost your app’s rating and identify dissatisfied users to drill down into their experience and understand the reason behind their frustration.

Learn more about In-App Surveys

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Feature flags play a key role in mobile app development, but monitoring their performance and impact can be a challenge. Instabug already detects the feature flags associated with an issue, but with different users essentially receiving different versions of the app, mobile teams need to gain visibility over the stability and performance of individual feature flags and quickly identify any issues they introduce.

Whether you’re running A/B tests, testing on production, or selectively enabling app features to subscribers, the new features and experiments dashboard gives you a centralized place to monitor the stability and performance of your feature flags.

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This consolidated view allows you to keep an eye on the overall stability and performance of your feature flags and dig deeper to reveal their performance. Instabug also automatically identifies issues that were introduced by a feature flag and issues that are exclusively associated with a specific flag to enable you to quickly identify exactly where they originated and understand their impact to make informed decisions about expanding their rollout.

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Explore the features and experiments dashboard in the sandbox or learn more in our docs.

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Many mobile teams use web views to deliver all their app’s content or include them in some components. Now you can monitor their stability and performance with webview support.

Instabug now supports web views delivered through the iOS WKWebView or Android WebView libraries and captures their performance metrics and web vitals out of the box, giving you visibility over the user experience of the web content you use in your mobile app.

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Explore web view debugging in the sandbox or learn more in our docs for iOS and Android.

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Bug reports enable you to detect elusive issues facing your users, but a large volume of reports can be difficult to manage, triage, and debug effectively. Without an easy and automated process to correctly assign incoming reports, bugs start piling up and can quickly overwhelm your team.

We’ve now expanded team ownership to Bug Reporting to enable you to automatically route bug reports to the right team based on their category, user attributes, or the screen they were reported from. Once you create teams and define their ownership, you can use alerts and rules to create an automated, scalable routing workflow that can handle a high volume of reports.

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Explore team ownership for Bug Reporting in the sandbox.

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Schedule Android rollouts

Google Play’s staged releases are a great way to release new versions gradually and mitigate the impact of any issues they might introduce. However, it requires you to manually update the percentage of users you release to, adding unnecessary steps and opening the door to human error.

Now you can create a customized rollout schedule for your Android releases, and Instabug will automatically update your rollout percentage. Create your rollout schedule once and automate all your Google Play rollouts.

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Learn more about Google Play rollout automation in our docs.

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Automate rollout management

Maintaining the health of your version rollouts is a manual process that requires you to pause or accelerate a rollout depending on its performance manually. Instabug enables you to create rules that will automatically pause or accelerate a rollout depending on its crash-free session rate and Apdex.

Now you can release with confidence and ensure that unhealthy rollouts will instantly be identified and stopped in their tracks and healthy rollouts will be delivered to users without unnecessary delays.

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Stay on top of your rollout progress

Stay on top of your rollout progress with alerts for rollout status and release percentage changes, and receive a daily summary of the status and performance of your version rollouts. This helps you keep your team updated on the progress of version rollouts and get notified whenever their status and release percentage change.

Learn more about rollout automation and alerting in our docs.

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Find the sessions that matter

To help you quickly find the user sessions that need your attention, we’re introducing four new filters to Session Replay. Now you can filter your app’s sessions by OS, device, country, and session type —whether the user had a crashing, frustrating, tolerable, or satisfying experience. This makes it easy to surface the app sessions you’re looking for and make more nuanced investigations into your user experience.

Explore the new filters in the sandbox.

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Get a detailed view of session performance

Get a better view of the experience your app sessions offer with the newly added visibility over app launch and screen-loading metrics in the session timeline. This makes it easier to identify performance issues, understand their impact on users, and prioritize and fix them accordingly.

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Explore the new Session Replay performance metrics in the sandbox.

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Integrate with your support tools

Automatically link support tickets to the user session they’re raised from to make it easier for your support team to investigate. Now, the [API name] API enables you to export the session URL and attach it to the support ticket whenever a user starts a conversation.

Learn more about the session URL API in our docs for iOS and Android.

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Detect the CodePush version of stability issues

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

Learn more about CodePush support in our docs.

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Easier triage with improved crash grouping

React Native crash reports now undergo an additional regrouping step after deobfuscation for more accurate crash grouping to help you better understand their impact and prioritize them accordingly.

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Automatically identify app store reviews submitted through custom app rating prompts and view their respective sessions to help you understand the user experience and identify and debug issues that impact your users.

Learn more about custom app rating prompt debugging in our docs for iOS and Android.

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Manage the stability and performance of your app across its entire lifecycle with expanded support for development environments. When creating a new app, you can now choose between the development, QA, alpha, beta, staging, and production environments to reflect its development stage.

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View the end-to-end lifecycle of your app’s network calls from the client to the server side with the new Datadog integration. Once you set up your integration, Instabug will automatically attach a traceID to network calls to link them to your backend monitoring and provide a direct link to the server-side occurrence on Datadog from the network call occurrence page on your Instabug dashboard.

Learn more about the Datadog network calls integration in our docs.

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Integrate with Azure DevOps to streamline and automate your team’s bug-reporting workflow. The Azure DevOps integration enables you to forward bug reports to your Azure DevOps workspace manually, automatically, or through Instabug’s rules.

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Experience the power of Instabug's built-for-mobile platform and deliver five-star mobile experiences —from beta testing to release, and throughout your app's entire lifecycle.