Watch how users interact with your native mobile apps in a video-like playback that captures taps, gestures, and navigation flows. Dynatrace® Session Replay for mobile apps helps practitioners resolve customer complaints, reproduce issues, analyze user behavior, and improve overall mobile experience with real-world context and no guesswork.
Mobile teams struggle to solve what they can’t see
For many businesses, mobile is now the most critical channel for engaging users. Mobile apps are where purchases happen, accounts are created, and first impressions are made. But it’s also where users are most likely to abandon their journeys if something feels broken, slow, or unintuitive.
All practitioners struggle to understand what actually happened during a user’s session when something goes wrong or when a user behaves in a way that deviates from the expected journey. This can get particularly puzzling when there are no apparent errors or performance blockers hindering a user’s experience. Traditional tools provide fragmentary details: logs, events, crash reports, or aggregated analytics. However, none of these capture the full context. Mobile engineers are unable to reliably reproduce bugs without seeing exact user actions. Support teams can’t respond effectively to vague or incomplete user reports.
Full visibility into mobile user behavior
This is where Session Replay comes in. This capability recreates real user behavior in a video-like playback, so you can visually step through a session just as the user experienced it: taps, swipes, scrolls, page transitions, and all. And now, for the first time, this powerful capability extends beyond the browser and crashes on mobile apps to include full sessions for native mobile apps.
With Dynatrace Session Replay for mobile apps, teams get a complete, contextual view of how users interact with mobile apps in the wild by collecting and visualizing key signals like gestures, views, UI states, and navigation paths. While Session Replay is often seen as a frontend-focused tool, it can significantly help identify, triage, and resolve backend issues by connecting user actions to system behavior. This helps contextualize backend failures, correlate user actions to backend events, and, in a nutshell, identify misalignment between front and backends.
How to make the most of Dynatrace Session Replay for Mobile Apps
Let’s dive into key use cases where Session Replay delivers tangible value across teams:
Faster debugging
Understanding the problem is often impossible with only data from Logs or Real User Monitoring. In some cases, observing the sessions where the error occurs can provide valuable context and lead to a more accurate solution.
Use case: Imagine your team can’t reproduce a performance issue affecting only a small segment of users still using iOS 17. Logs are inconclusive, and RUM data doesn’t tell the whole story.
With Session Replay, you can:
- Watch the exact gestures and actions related to the issue.
- See which page or interaction triggered the problem.
- Identify whether it’s a device-specific issue, a network hiccup, or a UI bug.
Result: Your dev team fixes the issue in hours, not days, without needing to reproduce it manually.
UX optimization and boosting conversion
The best way to understand users is to observe how they engage with your applications. Session Replay allows you to select a sample of mobile sessions based on various criteria. Watching these sessions helps you learn about annoyances and understand patterns in user behavior, which can then be streamlined into a better user experience.
Use case: Your analytics show a drop-off in the final step of your checkout funnel, and you don’t know why. Is it a confusing UI? A broken button? A slow-loading view?
With Session Replay, you can:
- Watch real user sessions to see where they pause, scroll, or back out.
- Identify if users struggle with form validation, payment options, or navigation.
- Spot rage taps or repeated attempts to interact with unresponsive elements.
Result: You optimize the checkout flow, reduce abandonment, and increase conversions—backed by real user behavior.
Improved customer support
Allowing help desk personnel to review the session that prompted a user’s complaint provides common ground for the conversation and helps ensure user satisfaction.
Use case: A user submits a support ticket: “The app didn’t work when I tried to book a ride.” No screenshots, no steps to reproduce, and the issue can’t be replicated.
With Session Replay, your support team can:
- Instantly view the user’s session to see what they saw.
- Understand the context: which screen they were on, what they tapped, and what went wrong.
- Provide a fast, accurate response, or escalate with full context to engineering.
Result: Faster resolution, happier users, and fewer back-and-forth emails.
Data privacy
Dynatrace adheres to world-class standards for data protection. Mobile session data is secured just like any other captured telemetry. However, privacy configurations must still be reviewed by each customer to ensure compliance with internal and legal requirements. Like web applications, Session Replay for mobile applications offers three levels of privacy controls:
- Safest – Masks all editable text fields, labels, images, switches, and web views
- Safe – Masks all editable text fields only
- Custom – By default, behaves like Safest, but allows you to define exactly which elements or views to mask.
See configure custom masking in the preferred documentation below.
Turn on Dynatrace Session Replay for Mobile Apps
Cluster-side activation
Session Replay is now supported for both iOS (including those built in SwiftUI) and Android apps (including those using Jetpack Compose). To get started, you’ll first need to turn it on for each mobile app, as it’s managed separately at the cluster level.
To activate the feature:
- Navigate to: Frontends → Select a mobile application → Edit → Enablement and cost control
- Set the Session Replay Mobile toggle to on.
Once turned on, you can define the percentage of sessions to capture. By default, Dynatrace captures 100% of sessions, but you can reduce this based on your data volume and storage needs.
Session Replay for Mobile integrates seamlessly with Session Replay for Crashes. This allows you to:
- Automatically capture 100% of crash sessions
- Sample a configurable percentage of all other sessions
If you’re hosting Dynatrace on-premises, make sure to prepare for increased storage requirements before enabling this feature.
Instrumentation and configuration of a mobile application
Scenarios differ depending on the operating system, so please follow our documentation:
The instrumentation and configuration process is simplified for customers who have already used Session Replay for Crashes or mobile Real User Monitoring.
Looking for answers?
Start a new discussion or ask for help in our Q&A forum.
Go to forum