Observability for Mobile with OpenTelemetry - OpenObservability Talks S5E10

Observability into mobile native applications presents unique challenges, from capturing real user interactions to dealing with network constraints and battery efficiency. In this episode of OpenObservability Talks, we explore the special characteristics of client-side telemetry, and how OpenTelemetry helps generate mobile client telemetry for real user monitoring (RUM), enabling deeper insights into performance and user experience. 

We host Hanson Ho, Android architect at Embrace and an approver on the OpenTelemetry Android SDK. Hanson brings a wealth of experience from Twitter, Salesforce and SAP. He will share his expertise on instrumenting mobile apps, the evolution of OpenTelemetry for Android, and best practices for collecting and analyzing mobile telemetry. Tune in to learn how to bring OpenTelemetry-powered observability to your mobile applications!

The episode was live-streamed on 17 March 2025 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIid85wO8gc

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

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Show Notes:

00:00 - Intro

01:42 - the unique characteristics of mobile env

03:39 - Android presents additional challenges

05:41 - observability in everyday frontend dev

12:01 - observability for business metrics in mobile apps

18:28 - collecting telemetry in constrained mobile devices

23:03 - Twitter scale observability into mobile apps

29:01 - how mobile monitoring used to work before OpenTelemetry

33:37 - OpenTelemetry expansion from server-side into client-side telemetry

44:09 - OpenTelemetry Android SDK working group

50:53 - Embrace’s journey into OpenTelemetry

1:00:04 - Outro

Resources:

• OpenTelemetry Android SDK: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-android

• OpenTelemetry Client SDK and Instrumentation SIG board: https://github.com/orgs/open-telemetry/projects/19/views/1 

• Adding client-side support to OpenTelemetry: https://medium.com/p/a389144f3812#2fcf  

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Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social

Hanson Ho

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanson-ho/

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/bidetofevil.wtf