Never Lose Another User: Manage Users Not Errors

The new error dashboard & Insight Boxes give you more ways than ever before to track issues and to understand WHICH errors have the biggest impact on user experience & cause unhappy users to disengage. Happy users add value to your brand, buzz to your business, and dollars to your pocketbook.   

Real-time correlation of errors, sessions, affected users, & user engagement in an easy-to-view format makes it easy to zero in on and fix the error(s) that cause users to disengage.  

Developers and development teams are able to shift from simply fixing errors to managing user experience.   Because we analyze your data as it comes in, you can quickly see the impact of a new release on your users, identify user engagement trends, & view most used and most affected devices.   BigData-crunching Insight Boxes put mobile application data to work for our customers - Indie to Enterprise.

Best of all, mobile apps receive a MobDex score.  Using the sophisticated MobDex algorithm*, a score of 1 - 100 is calculated for the two most recently deployed versions of a mobile app.  In other words, developers, development teams and managers can see (and promote to their users)  an objective measurement of Application Quality and Mobile App User Satisfaction.  High MobDex scores correlate to an increase in sessions; low MobDex scores to a decrease.  

*MobDex, based on a sophisticated proprietary algorithm, measures and certifies the quality of an app based on an analysis of sessions, crashes, and user disengagement. The algorithm applies a standard deviation on aggregated results to insure accurate results.

Developers are already using MobDex to promote the quality of their apps.  Put your mobile app data to work for you!

Welcome new BugSenser!

Have you checked out the BugSense team page recently? If you have, then you may have noticed that our team is getting bigger.

Our new shining star is George; he’s here to help you rock your Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps! People usually refer to him as a “Software Architect” but we see him as our own personal Microsoft Guru!

His own comment on working with the Bugsense team is short and simple:

“Working with BugSense feels awesome!”

Welcome George!

BugSense at Google IO Developer Sandbox

BugSense is extremely proud to be invited to Google’s annual developer conference, which will be held May 15-17 in San Francisco.    We will showcase our Mobile App Quality monitoring at the Developer Sandbox,  joining a select group of companies to showoff solutions based on the technologies featured at the event.  

A Press Release about our participation at the event would read something like this. This achievement made me reflect a little bit on what we have achieved over the last two years because companies don’t move forward because of Press Releases. Companies move forward and succeed because of a clear vision and great people to make the vision a reality.

Two years ago, Jon Vlachoyiannis and I tried to soft-launch a service called Sfalma at Google IO. We didn’t know anyone in Silicon Valley; all we had were two tickets for the event because we were the organizers of GDG Greece.  In the intervening two years, Sflama became BugSense, we put together a talented team and built a marketing-leading product.  We’re returning this year with two of our top engineers, Alex and Kostas, to represent BugSense at the Google IO Developer Sandbox at the invitation of Google.

I was excited to get an email from Google that recognizes our success, “You have implemented our developer tools, APIs and products in inspiring ways.”   I know our success is possible only because our customers use our product, provide us valuable feedback, and our team stays true to our vision of building a product that helps our customers maintain high quality mobile applications. 

The last two years have been very intense & really rewarding, and Google IO feels like a great time to recognize the hard work of our team, thank our loyal customers, and celebrate!  It’s also a great time to look forward to the future.  Our team will continue to grow, release more features, work with our new Japanese partners, welcome more customers across the globe, of course, ”keep mobile running.”

If you are going to Google IO we’d love to celebrate with you!  Come find us!  After all, without you we wouldn’t be here!

Panos

Big in Japan!

Hello from IT Week in Tokyo, Japan!

Bugsense is here with our partners from SunFuture, Inc. to announce the opening of our third office!  Our newest location is in Tokyo-Japan; you can also find us at BugSense.jp.

Through the Tokyo office, SunFuture, Inc., will provide local & regional sales & support for developers and companies, giving the Asian market even easier access to our BigData-driven insights into mobile application performance.  

BugSense started offering services to developers almost 2 years ago,  and we are already the 3rd most used SDK in the world (after Google Analytics and Flurry).  

First quarter 2013 found us with more than 20k customers globally across many sectors, including financial, security, entertainment, consumer, gaming, and more.  Indie developers to Fortune 10 companies use our product for insights into how errors impact their end users and maintaining a high quality standard in their mobile apps.   

SunFuture is a solution provider and system integrator of mobile and cloud solutions to Japanese carriers, enterprises and developer communities.  SunFuture is a joint venture between Silicon Valley’s FutureDial Inc. and Japan’s Sun Corporation, and they focus on identifying leading technologies/solutions from around the world and bringing them to the Japanese market.  Hide Maeda, SunFuture President and CEO, was especially interested in the way Bugsense Insight Boxes use lightning-fast BigData analysis to help developers and development teams implement and maintain a customer-experience driven mobile application strategy.

From two developers tracking their own apps in the wild, BugSense has grown to include a 20 person team with top talent in the US, Europe and Japan.  Our custom BigData database (LDB) is handling ~520M devices around the world, using less than 10 servers, and serving the needs of more customers on more continents than ever before.  We couldn’t  be happier about it.  

I cannot thank you enough for trusting us with your apps, helping us build a great product, providing great feedback, and sharing the fun along the way!

If you see any of the BugSensers at SF (Google IO), Tokyo or London/Athens, we are buying you a beer.

- Jon 

BigData in Motion: Building a Real-Time Android Infographic

Bugsense worked on a year-long joint research initiative with pHD researchers at ISTLab of AUEB to analyze the root causes of Android app crashes.   At Droidcon Berlin, the findings were presented at the conference by Panos, Bugsense Co-Founder and CEO. 

More than 10M stack traces were extracted & analyzed with some very cool findings.    We thought the cool findings needed to be shared with conference attendees - and developers everywhere -  in a cool way, so we decided to demonstrate Android errors and their root causes in real-time!  

An Infographic seemed like a great real-time showcase so we got busy. Displaying ~200 errors per second in real-time and analyzing traffic of ~10,000 req/sec is not an easy task and the conference was coming up quickly, so we decided to pull it together in a weekend Hackathon.  Using 1 server, our custom database - LDB, and our big-data crunching experience, our team went to work.

Using an LQL script we created (essentially LISP code with an analytics DSL), we tracked which root exceptions were trending for different Android flavors and devices (in real-time), stored results in memory, and saved to HD every couple of minutes.

Then, it was just a matter of grabbing the results and returning a JSON response - ALL from the same LQL script!   This is the main file that does all the processing (imagine doing the following with Hadoop or Storm):

The data was streaming in, and the Infographic was displaying data perfectly.   Then, 4 hours before the presentation, we noticed data was slowing.   We had chosen some arbitrary limits for the number of results and we were streaming all root exceptions and all OS versions to LDB. We realized we had 800,000 x 800,000 combinations on our hands and the view was taking up to a minute to respond. Yeap, just a minute (long live in-memory databases) - but we wanted something snappier.

Because of our joint analysis with ISTLab, we knew the top 10 root cause exceptions account for > 80% of all Android errors (pareto theorem anyone?), so we limited the number of OS versions tracked to the official releases by Google.  This reduced the available combination to < 1000 and voila! we were delivering a snappy real-time infographic! We should give a shout out to pusher.com for delivering the individual crashes to the World Map via websockets!  Using Pusher was a no-brainer, set and forget!  Thanks pusher.com.

What started as a 2-day Hackathon, ended up as a featured Visual.ly infographic, the buzz at Droidcon Berlin, and a great display of LDB’s BigData real-time data-crunching power!

Feel free to share thoughts or questions at @bugsense or stop by and see us at Google IO May 15 - 17.  

- Panos