Did you know that 70% of mobile app users will abandon an app if it takes too long to load, while 57% will consider switching to a competitor after just 3-4 negative interactions with a company’s website or mobile app?
Suboptimal performance under poor network conditions often exacerbates these poor user experiences. It's no surprise that network-related issues account for the top most common reasons for mobile app crashes and failures! Unchecked bandwidth bottlenecks can cause app failures, resulting in crashes or a degraded user experience, leading to loss of revenue and users.
The Challenges of Debugging Mobile Apps
Poor network performance can lead to app crashes, freezes, and user churn. Ensuring reliability under all network conditions is crucial for maintaining high user ratings and engagement.
During high-traffic events like Black Friday, apps experience a surge in network requests that can lead to critical issues like failed transactions and degraded user experience. Standard monitoring often falls short, capturing only isolated app-level data and missing interactions across system-wide components that may contribute to these performance issues. Without visibility into all HTTP/HTTPS requests from the device—including those from hybrid or complex multi-framework applications—teams lack the holistic insights needed to identify problematic interactions or latent dependencies precisely at the moments when reliability is most critical.
Further, debugging apps often involves tracking down elusive issues like:
API failures: HTTP Calls to backend services that time out, fail, or return incorrect data can go unnoticed without proper visibility into network API behavior.
Performance bottlenecks: Slow network requests, unhandled errors, and responses that could degrade the user experience are often hard to pinpoint, especially in geographical environments with unreliable connections or different content restrictions.
Inconsistent app behavior: Certain failures may only manifest under specific network conditions, making it difficult to reproduce issues without the ability to simulate such conditions.
Enter: System-Wide Network Capture
Sauce Labs’ integrated Network Capture capability addresses these challenges head-on, by allowing you to track and analyze HTTP/HTTPS traffic for all native frameworks (Espresso, XCUITest) and Android Appium. Our system-wide network capture enhances network monitoring by providing a holistic view of network activity and deeper insights into how various components of the device interact with external services, regardless of the framework or application type. This essentially acts as a more powerful and secure alternative to proxy sniffing tools like Charles Proxy, Fiddler, Proxyman, and Burp Suite. Say goodbye to the convoluted setup of traditional proxies, as everything is built directly into the Sauce Labs platform for easy access at your convenience.
Key Benefits for Mobile App Developers, QA and SDETs include:
Accelerate Debugging and Resolution: With the ability to inspect network traffic in real-time during our Live Testing experience, QA and developers can instantly determine where and when in the app lifecycle an issue occurred. The granular level of detail provided by Network Capture means less guesswork, helping development and QA teams to precisely correlate when an app’s UI displayed an error with the specific network call occurring at that moment. Improve App Performance: By understanding how apps behave under varying network conditions, teams can optimize app performance, improving load times and overall responsiveness.
Achieve Holistic Capture and Insights: Unlike traditional sniffers that may only capture traffic related to specific apps, Sauce Labs’ system-wide capture grabs all network traffic on the device, offering a complete view of all API calls.
Get Cross-framework Support: Whether you're testing natively built, hybrid, or cross-platform developed apps like Flutter, React Native, or Cordova, you can now capture and analyze HTTP/HTTPS traffic and see your app’s API calls without the complexities introduced by different architectures. Sauce Labs’ Real Device Cloud fully integrates the Network Capture feature, allowing seamless debugging across Android, iOS, and cross-platform frameworks like React Native and Flutter.
Collaborate Better Across Teams: Since Network Capture provides detailed insights into the exact nature of failures, it reduces the "blame game" between developers, testers, and operations teams. QA and SDETs can quickly hand off specific failure points to developers with precise evidence. Just send the HAR file for a failing mobile app test.
Key Use-Cases of System-Wide Network Capture
Debugging API Failures: You can inspect each HTTP/HTTPS request in real-time, filter out the necessary HTTP status code, which enables you to locate faulty API calls and potential issues in the app’s interaction with external APIs. See request and response structures with a single click.
Optimizing App Performance: By recording network traffic, you can identify which requests are taking too long and why, creating bottlenecks in app performance. Export the HAR files from a session, and send them to your backend or mobile app dev for debugging!
Troubleshooting Connectivity Issues: Identify the nature of a failure such as identifying requests that time out, incorrect requests, headers or response codes.
Drive Quality at Speed with Robust Mobile App Diagnostics and Debugging Tools
To help software development organizations deliver best-in-class mobile apps at speed, they need a comprehensive suite of diagnostic test information, quality signals, more context, and actionable data. Sauce Labs (Real Device Cloud) offers the broadest suite of Mobile App Diagnostic information and quality signals to help identify the root cause of failures faster and speed up resolution.
With Sauce Labs users can combine Network Capture with Network Throttling. Network Throttling allows you to test your apps by simulating different network conditions (such as 2G, 3G, or high-latency networks). By combining the power of Network Throttling with Network Capture, you can:
Reproduce intermittent issues: By simulating poor network conditions and capturing traffic simultaneously, you can reproduce tricky bugs that may be causing crashes or performance degradation.
Analyze network resilience: Understand how well your app handles network failures, such as retrying requests after timeouts or switching between networks (e.g., from Wi-Fi to cellular).
Ensure API reliability: Confirm whether your backend services are robust enough to handle poor network conditions and provide graceful degradation.
Explore Sauce Labs Diagnostics and Debugging Tool Set
Empower your development team to build, test, debug, and deliver quality mobile apps that they can release faster and with confidence. See how it works with a free Sauce Labs trial.
