OpenTelemetry enables engineers to speak a common language across app boundaries. An emerging use-case is in debugging common issues for mobile apps.

Existing tools like Android Studio Profiler provide powerful capabilities to detect and address all kinds of performance issues, such as UI thread blocking, memory leaks, or excessive CPU usage. However, these miss the user-facing issues when Android applications make it into production! Certain problems don’t show up in controlled environments, with consistent network connectivity, predictable user behavior, and a limited range of testing devices. In the real world, users interact with apps in unexpected ways, with diverse hardware, and varying conditions, exposing issues that are difficult to replicate locally.