How Zuper unlocked full mobile visibility and cut debug time with bitdrift

The challenge: limited visibility across complex mobile workflows

Zuper's app is mission-critical for field technicians who capture large volumes of photos and videos as part of their daily workflows. The field service app helps technicians across cleaning, construction, HVAC, security, and many other industries deliver high quality, in-person service, processing more than six million work orders and handling over 300 million API calls to date. That constant stream of media creates heavy storage and performance demands, making it difficult to ensure a seamless experience for users working in the field.

To ensure their performance is consistent and top-tier for their users, the team at Zuper needed a way to reliably monitor app health, performance, and storage behavior at scale, and easily debug issues in the wild.

Before bitdrift, the team relied on Sentry and Mixpanel to piece together user behavior and error events. But the setup only gave partial visibility.

"The first signal that something went wrong was usually a Slack error notification," said Ranjith Kumar, Engineering Manager at Zuper. "From there, we'd have to jump between Sentry and Mixpanel to reconstruct the story. But we never had the full picture of what the user was doing, whether the device was under memory pressure, or what the OS constraints were."

That lack of context meant Zuper's engineers often spent hours tracing the root cause of production issues, or worse, reacting only after customers experienced them.

The solution: unified context & proactive debugging

When evaluating observability solutions, Zuper needed a tool that could:

1. Provide complete on-device visibility (not just crash traces)
2. Control when and how logs were sent to avoid noise and cost
3. Work seamlessly with their mobile stack, without them needing to build an internal platform team

"We were on the verge of building a lightweight in-house tool," Ranjith recalled. "But we didn't want the infrastructure overhead. bitdrift offered exactly what we were trying to build, control over what to log and when, without giving up visibility."

Since adopting bitdrift, Zuper's team has consolidated performance monitoring, crash analysis, and real-user context into a single dashboard. The session timelines and alerting workflows in particular have become central to how the team works.

"We've set up alerts in Slack so our engineers don't have to babysit dashboards. When something goes wrong, we're notified instantly. We jump into bitdrift, open the session timeline, and can usually fix the issue on the fly."

The results: finding what Sentry missed

Adding bitdrift to their observability stack immediately revealed insights the team didn't have before, particularly around storage and battery-related issues that directly affected user experience.

"We realized many of the crashes showing up in Sentry were caused by device storage or battery constraints… signals Sentry never surfaced. bitdrift gave us an eagle's-eye view of what was happening on-device."

Zuper's iOS engineers also noticed improvements in crash accuracy and symbolication. Recalling a recent issue, Ranjith shared, "Some iOS native crashes weren't fully symbolicated in our existing setup despite having dSYMs. Bitdrift surfaced clearer native symbols in those cases, which helped us pinpoint the issue faster"

bitdrift's instant insights dashboards have also become an essential part of decision-making, helping validate assumptions and uncover patterns across regions, devices, and releases. Ranjith explained, "We discovered latency issues affecting a specific region that we never would've caught otherwise. Instant insights have helped us confirm or challenge the assumptions behind our software decisions."

One step further: creating unified visibility for cross-platform SDKs

Beyond the app, Zuper also ships Zync - a Kotlin Multiplatform SDK that powers offline-first data synchronization for field technicians. Ranjith shared, "bitdrift has become our single source of truth for monitoring Zync across Android and iOS, helping us catch SDK-level issues early and debug them with consistent on-device context, regardless of platform."

Looking ahead: smarter automation & faster issue resolution

For Zuper, bitdrift has become more than just a crash reporting tool; it's a window into the real-world performance of their app and the experiences of their customers. Ranjith said, "bitdrift gives us all the right signals to be proactive, even before the customer reaches us. It's been a critical milestone for Zuper."

Today, Zuper's mobile team uses bitdrift daily to monitor performance and mitigate issues quickly. The Zuper team is even developing an AI-powered agent that automatically pulls bitdrift logs from Slack alerts to generate debugging summaries.

"We're planning to integrate bitdrift directly into our internal AI agents so they can analyze logs as soon as alerts trigger," Ranjith explained. "That way, our engineers get an instant head start."

The Zuper team is continuing to iterate at lightning speed and keeping observability and performance at the forefront with tools like bitdrift.

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