Features
Performance-centric mobile observability SDK
The Capture SDK offers a lightweight library built for mobile apps & optimized for performance. At under 1MB compiled, the SDK offers bounded, predictable resource consumption, with:High volume, asynchronous local storage and persistence
Compact binary formats
Compressed communication between client and server that keeps improving as more data is exchanged
Configurable memory, disk, and CPU utilization
Real-time configuration hot swapping
bitdrift's mobile observability SDK is built on a high-performance core shared across mobile and server platforms, wrapped in lightweight native layers for iOS and Android.
The SDK performs most of its work on its own background threads, with great care taken to minimize its impact on the rest of the application. Almost all operations are asynchronous and batched, especially around telemetry capture and emission. Usable from any thread, the vast majority of processing is offloaded from the caller’s thread to dedicated background threads, enabling low-overhead data collection.
Currently running on over 150 million devices, bitdrift Capture has been battle-tested across a wide range of hardware. Every part of the system is configurable through a persistent, bidirectional connection to the bitdrift control plane. Combined with real-time persistence control, this gives developers an industry first: free observability on mobile clients.
Blazingly fast. Fully controlled. Truly mobile-first.
Built in Rust for memory safety and performance, with full real-time configurability down to the device level.Frequently asked questions about bitdrift Capture
A mobile observability SDK is a library embedded directly in a mobile app that collects telemetry data, such as logs, traces, errors, and performance metrics, from the device at runtime. Unlike server-side observability tools, a mobile SDK operates under tight constraints: limited CPU and memory budgets, variable connectivity, battery considerations, and the inability to push updates without an app release. A well-designed mobile observability SDK minimizes its own footprint while giving engineering teams the data they need to understand how their app behaves in the real world, across real devices and network conditions. bitdrift Capture is an example of a mobile observability SDK.
Backend observability assumes abundant resources and reliable infrastructure. You can add agents, increase log verbosity, and redeploy in minutes. Mobile is the opposite: the SDK runs on hardware you do not control, on networks you cannot predict, inside an app that users may not update for months. Because of this, mobile observability requires local buffering for offline scenarios, strict resource caps to avoid affecting app performance or battery life, and the ability to change what data gets collected without shipping a new app version. It also means that raw log volume must be managed on-device rather than filtered after the fact, since transmitting everything is too costly. bitdrift Capture was built specifically for these constraints, rather than adapted from a backend observability tool.
The Capture SDK compiles to under 1MB, making it one of the smallest full-featured mobile observability SDKs available for iOS and Android.
No. Nearly all Capture SDK operations run asynchronously on dedicated background threads. Telemetry capture and emission are batched, so the SDK's work is offloaded from the main thread and does not block UI rendering or affect startup time.
The core SDK is written in Rust, which provides memory safety and predictable performance. Platform-specific native layers wrap the core for iOS (Swift/Objective-C) and Android (Kotlin/Java).
Yes. Memory, disk, and CPU utilization limits are all configurable, either at build time or in real time via the bitdrift control plane without requiring an app release.
The Capture SDK is deployed across more than 150 million devices and has been present in over 1 billion distinct app installs, demonstrating its broad hardware compatibility across a wide range of iOS and Android device generations.
Yes. The Capture SDK uses high-volume local storage and persistence, so telemetry is buffered locally when connectivity is degraded and transmitted when a connection is available.
bitdrift Capture supports logs, spans, session replay, crash reporting, real user monitoring, funnels, and user journeys, all from a single lightweight SDK integration.