Announcing Sessions + Replays: Time travel debugging for mobile apps

From early build inspection all the way to active debugging, developers continually experience pain points when finding and fixing issues with their build. Developers often:

• Receive JIRA tickets about a bug with limited information that prevents them from taking steps to recreate the issue to then fix it
• Have trouble sharing something that looks off while playing with a build
• Unable to reproduce an issue and are stuck guessing what happened

The common thread in all the above scenarios: a lack of context. Without the proper context, developers will naturally struggle to reproduce, and ultimately fix, an issue they encounter.

So, Waldo has built out two new features to address these issues. 

Today, I am excited to announce the launch of Sessions and Replays. With these features, developers will have access to critical information that gives them full visibility into both the UI/UX and backend when someone is interacting with their mobile app.

Sessions allows you to simply upload a build, and begin interacting with it on a device in the configuration of your choosing. It’s that simple. No more time wasted with local setup or Charles Proxy. 

Whether you are testing out a new feature, playing around with a new build, reviewing a teammate’s work, understanding the order of API calls from a user’s perspective, or trying to recreate a reported issue…Sessions is for you.

Device interaction is just the start. As you move through user flows, all the network requests and logs will stream alongside your device, giving you insight into the visual layer of your app performance and programmatic layers underneath. 

As every developer knows, bugs are unexpected. This makes it hard to recreate an issue you discover unless you are carefully documenting every step, interaction, and condition during testing. That is why every Session in Waldo is automatically recorded and stored as a Replay—containing a video playback of your test, the entire timeline of all attempted interactions, along with the network activity and logs.

When you're doing a Session on Waldo, you don't need to worry about capturing everything that happens, Waldo does it for you. It does not matter if that bug can be reproduced easily or not because it will be captured, with the proper context. These Replays are also easily shareable across your team, and stored on Waldo so you can go back and watch or reshare them as needed.

We are determined to give developers more visibility into their apps and be able to easily share those findings. There is a lot more coming soon as we continue to improve how mobile developers run, analyze, and debug their apps.

Waldo Sessions, which comes with Replays, is free, forever. Sign up here to upload your build and start playing around. We would love to hear your feedback about your experience and how we can make Sessions even better so please reach out to us at sessions@waldo.com or on Twitter at @usewaldo to share!