Intro to Fullstory for Mobile Apps

Who can use this feature?
- Available with Mobile add-on. 
- Requires an admin or architect role to configure. 

Optimizing the mobile experience matters now more than ever. Fullstory provides a comprehensive view of a customer’s journey, even across device types. Are a specific subset of users browsing on a mobile app and then completing the purchase on desktop? Are cart abandonments higher on one channel compared to another? Fullstory for Mobile Apps can help you start to answer these questions and paint a bigger picture of where and how your clients are engaging with your business.

 

Fullstory for Mobile Apps differs from the web implementation of Fullstory in many ways. However, both share the desire to not affect performance for the end-user and to surface all information that might be useful from an end-user digital experience perspective, all while respecting the privacy of the user.

On the web, Fullstory uses DOM elements as the building blocks of a page. We detect changes to the on-screen content, then reconstruct the change in our app in order to look like how a user experienced it later in playback.

On mobile devices, Fullstory uses view hierarchies as the building blocks of an app. The views are scanned periodically to detect changes, then reconstructed into “frames.” A mobile frame is a snapshot of the views, like images, text boxes, and other input elements currently on-screen, including their contents.

In both cases of mobile and web, we are capturing a set of instructions, not capturing videos, for how a device renders on an app or how a browser renders on a web page.

Mobile Privacy

Fullstory for Mobile Apps requires Private by Default that empowers product teams to debug experiences on native mobile applications while proactively respecting end-user privacy. Session re-creation for mobile apps isn't a screen recording and Fullstory never captures screenshots from an end-user's device. Similar to Fullstory for the web, where session replay represents a re-creation of a digital experience based on captured changes in the DOM, Fullstory's session re-creation for mobile apps is based on drawing operations, where text, images, and personal data are masked at the source by default, such that masked data never reaches Fullstory's servers. Lastly, Fullstory never captures the on-screen mobile keyboard. Instead, we display a mock keyboard graphic in playback. 

Install & Deployment

There are different ways for customers to install our SDK, depending on the operating system. Read more on that here: iOS or Android

It's important to understand the differences in deployment for web and mobile. On the web, Fullstory deploys the fs.js data capture snippet in the <head> of a site. For mobile, we deploy our SDK into our customer’s applications for mobile devices.

Interested in using Fullstory to understand and debug mobile app experiences? Request a demo or contact us to learn how to add Fullstory for Mobile Apps to your current account plan.

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