Instabug Inc., an artificial intelligence-powered mobile app observability and performance platform, today launched new features enabling developers to analyze user experience, targeting user frustration in a bid to increase retention.

Launched in 2014, Instabug known for a feature that allows users to shake their phone, or mobile device, to report a bug. It’s a full-featured mobile app quality platform providing developer teams with insights into app performance, issues, user session replays, crash reporting and more.

Today’s new set of features includes a consolidated method for tracking user frustration, focused around what the company calls “frustration-free sessions.”

Users encountering bugs and issues in mobile apps often don’t often complain directly. Instead, they may navigate aimlessly, struggle with menus or abandon the app altogether. This sort of frustration is either borne out in bottlenecks by slowing down in their progress or simply leaving the app, such as throwing items into a retail cart and then not buying anything because the app crashed or they were looking at a spinning circle.

“Oftentimes you get product and business managers who say we need to compete with our competitors on all the latest features, that’s the most important thing,” Kenny Johnston, chief product officer at Instabug, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “Well, actually when you look at the data, if you want to increase app retention and active users, what’s important is fixing app crashes or that slow screen load.”

Part of observability is understanding that the app is performing badly under the hood, causing the user to become frustrated because it’s running slowly or there’s a bug. Another part is revealing what parts of an app are causing users the most issues to give developers and business users a head’s up on where to focus their efforts.

Instabug uses AI to give technical managers a holistic view of app performance by combining what the company calls “frustration signals” and links them to real business impact so that these insights can be understood. This allows technical and business teams to work together to prioritize what technical improvements will keep users happy.

The Business Impact Dashboard enables business users to understand, justify and allocate technical resources based on data-driven insights into how app performance affects key business metrics. The dashboard includes an AI-generated description that explains how fixing the technical issues will benefit real-world business metrics.

“We spend a lot of time on mobile,” Johnston said, explaining that quality standards on mobile is set very high. “There’s no multitasking, every perceived issue in an app you are experiencing 100% of that perceived slowness. It’s also very easy to switch apps. So, the expectation about what makes the greatest airline app isn’t set by that app, it’s set by Instagram and Facebook. It’s not about me not using the competitor’s app; it’s me comparing it to the best app on my phone.”

Not all bugs and crashes are created equal, of course. Some crashes happen only to one in a billion users and are rarely seen, but some happen to thousands of users a day and have actual business impact. This is why Instabug created a prioritization list that shows which ones are causing the greatest issue for users and should be focused on and links them directly to their metrics and their observability telemetry so that they can be assigned to developers.

“We find that every mobile developer you know is proud of the app they built knows there are issues is aware of these pain points and they love to solve them,” Johnston said. “They just need this kind of business justification and why they should prioritize it.”

By having an AI-powered data-driven insights dashboard that business users can see to understand why they should budget time to maintenance, developer teams have the tools they need to show how that will help keep users who would otherwise abandon the app.

“Showing developers the real impact of what they’re building, I think, is critical,” added Johnston. “I’m always a big proponent a better software experience and that’s not always the most innovative UI or new feature. A lot of it is just how we deliver our quality app.”

Photo: Pixabay; image: Instabug