Embrace Brings OpenTelemetry to Mobile Developers for Extensible, User-Focused Mobile Observability

Mobile app observability company Embrace announced today that its native iOS and Android SDKs are now built on OpenTelemetry. The open-source, enterprise-supported SDKs combine Embrace’s unique insights into mobile user experiences with transparent, portable, and extensible data collection.

This launch pairs Embrace’s view on modeling user behavior with OpenTelemetry to better contextualize telemetry for user sessions. Engineers benefit from full visibility into mobile user experiences so they can resolve critical performance issues before they become widespread. With this release, anyone can use Embrace’s iOS and Android SDKs to send logs and spans to any OTLP capable tracing and logging backend, with metrics support soon to follow. Tutorials, documentation, and additional details can be found on Embrace’s OpenTelemetry page.

“It’s exciting to see participation in OpenTelemetry from a vendor like Embrace who is focused on user experience,” said Juraci Paixão Kröhling, Principal Engineer at Grafana Labs and OpenTelemetry Governing Board Member. “Evolving the OTel specification to better capture telemetry for client applications will ultimately raise the bar for what’s possible with mobile app observability.”

Modernizing Observability for Mobile App Engineering Teams Requires a New Approach

Mobile is ubiquitous today, driving valuable consumer transactions and engagement. Yet most teams haven’t modernized the way they drive performance improvements, prevent issues, and integrate insights from their user-facing footprint into their observability practice. Legacy real user monitoring (RUM), error and bug tracking, and crash reporting tools have proven to be inadequate for the challenges facing mobile teams. Server-side teams are managing to 99.98%+ SLAs, while mobile teams manage the user experience through a few simplistic metrics and highly sampled datasets.

Embrace collects the full technical and behavioral details of every user session, providing engineers with the necessary context to identify and resolve issues quickly. With this OTel solution, customers can also extend instrumentation to any custom library in their app and leverage Embrace’s platform to contextualize the added instrumentation. This empowers engineers to explore insights and expedite issue resolution. Additionally, Embrace’s instrumentation is compatible with any OTel backend, offering flexibility and ease of integration.

“We want to serve the thousands of engineers building incredible mobile apps that people rely on every day, and we look forward to the community collaboration that will come with shipping open-source, standards-based SDKs,” said Andrew Tunall, Chief Product Officer at Embrace. “We want to advance how the community thinks about modeling both programmatic and human-driven behavior in mobile apps. By standardizing mobile data collection and instrumentation through OTel, we can help engineers move faster and understand their valuable users.”

Mobile User Telemetry for Better App Performance

Teams seeking OTel-compliant tooling that’s built for mobile will gain the following with Embrace:

• Mobile telemetry built with the user in mind: Mobile teams require context-aware mobile telemetry. With Embrace, they can capture signals that are critical for maintaining a highly performant mobile app – like crashes, errors, ANRs (Application Not Responding), performance traces, memory issues, and full user sessions – modeled in OTel data types of spans and logs.

• Portable, vendor-agnostic data: Embrace collects critical mobile app signals. Teams have full control over where to send that data, whether to Embrace’s dashboard for advanced mobile insights, or to another observability stack. Embrace’s OpenTelemetry distribution comes with instructions to pair with an OTLP exporter that can send data to any OTel backend.

• Enterprise-ready and commercially supported tech: Embrace delivers the flexibility of an open source product with the reliability of a commercially supported one. Open source SDKs give engineers transparency and extensibility, while Embrace’s data backend and analysis platform is enterprise-supported for confidence in the adoption of secure and reliable observability software.

Embrace is a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and counts Adidas Runtastic, Cameo, GOAT, Hatch, Ibotta, Marriott, The New York Times, Warby Parker, Wildlife Studios, Yahoo!, and many more as customers.

Embrace’s open source OpenTelemetry SDKs are available on GitHub today. Tutorials on exporting data to open source tools like Zipkin and Jaeger can be found on Embrace’s YouTube playlist.

Additional resources:

• Embrace iOS SDK repo

• Embrace iOS OTel exporter walkthrough

• Embrace Android SDK repo

• Embrace Android OTel exporter walkthrough

• Video tutorials: Exporting Mobile OpenTelemetry Signals Using Embrace

About Embrace

Embrace helps engineers proactively manage the complexity of mobile to build better experiences. When users are finding problems first, and mobile teams are finding out last, using Embrace empowers engineers with quick, early detection of user-impacting issues before they become widespread. With the ability to identify and prioritize the impact of any app issues with detailed behavioral and technical context, engineers can focus on building the best mobile experiences possible and leave the fire drills behind.

Embrace is supported by NEA, AV8 (Allianz), Greycroft, YCombinator, and Eniac along with investments from the founders of PagerDuty, MoPub, Testflight, Sendbird, and Scopely. Embrace was selected by YCombinator to participate in the highly selective YC Growth program for their highest potential growth-stage companies. Embrace is based in Culver City, Palo Alto, Buenos Aires, and London.

Contact Information

Colin Contreary

Head of Content

Embrace

press@embrace.io