Session Replay for Mobile is Now in Open Beta

[bruno-garcia]

We’re excited to finally announce that Session Replay is now available for mobile applications in open beta for React Native, iOS and Android.

Session Replay lets developers see a visual reproduction of user engagement with their app, so you can understand when, where, and how an error is impacting your app without having to repro it yourself or talk to a customer. With Replay, you have full visibility into how issues such as crashes, application hangs, and high latency occur. You can also assess how severe an issue is depending on the impact on the UI or how the user responded.

Replay for mobile includes details like battery life, OS version, device specs, network requests, and exceptions that help you understand what’s happening going on with your app behind the scenes to get to the root of the problem.

Get Started

You can install mobile replay by just updating your SDK and a few lines of code. See the set up instructions for Android, iOS, and React Native SDKs below. Support for Flutter is being tracked on this GitHub issue.

• iOS
• Android
• React Native

Sentry is privacy-first; as such, our privacy configuration by default is that all text and images are redacted to ensure no sensitive user information is collected. However, if you don’t have any sensitive information on your website, you can opt-out of the redaction (see docs above for more information). For product documentation and a FAQ, check out the product docs.

We Want to Hear Your Feedback

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know. Once you’ve tried mobile replay, please share your feedback below. 👇 If you would like to report a bug, please open a GitHub issue with a link to a relevant replay (Android, iOS and React Native).

[tday]

Congrats! The session replay URL for iOS links to React Native

[kahest]

Thanks! I updated the link :)

[jas-kas]

FYI We're hosting a workshop next week Wednesday on how to solve mobile bugs with Session Replay. This is your chance to ask your questions on Mobile Replay directly to our eng team and see a demo of Mobile Replay live. 🎉 You can sign up here: https://sentry.io/resources/solve-mobile-bugs-with-session-replay/

[kitTiwari]

Is sentry replay available for self hosted/on-premise latest version ?

[bruno-garcia]

During the beta we're not actively targeting self hosted. That said, there's nothing we did to make it 'not work' on SH. If you manage to give it a try, please reply here if it works as I'm sure it'll be useful to others.
Once we get close to GA we'll make sure things work properly on SH too!

[garudamon]

the replay for react native is not working with SH, I have compared it

[garudamon]

@jas-kas hi jasmine, do you have any schedule for releasing the support of replay on self hosted?

[jas-kas]

Hey @garudamon! Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, this will not be until another few months as we're prioritizing redaction capabilities, improving performance overhead impact, more sampling options, etc.

[jtavio]

Hello good afternoon, does this also work for flutter?

[jas-kas]

Hey @jtavio!

Yes, we now support Flutter. Please see v8.9.0 of our Flutter SDK for instructions.

[Legion2]

How can I add custom tags to session replays so I can filter replays in sentry by the custom tags? Tags I set with beforeSend do not apply to the session replays.

[Legion2]

RN, android, iOS and Kotlin multiplatform

[romtsn]

@Legion2 which SDK do you want to call beforeSend from? In general, Sentry.setTag() should work for replays already, but beforeSend might not be available for all platforms

[Legion2]

currently we call beforeSend in RN, Android and ios, because in RN we handle js error and on android and ios we handle native exceptions. We already call event.setTag() in beforeSend. Should we use Sentry.setTag() instead?

[romtsn]

yeah, so the replay events are only available on iOS through beforeSend. We'll add something similar on Android, but I'm not sure if we can make it work for RN, because it'd require syncing the entire event over the bridge, which is expensive (the replay runs entirely on the native SDKs, RN just wraps some options and customization). So for the time being Sentry.setTag is the most reliable way to set a tag for replay events I believe (calling this in RN should work too).

[Legion2]

thats fine, we only use beforeSend in js and native, because js events are not processed in native, so we can only process them in js. If replays are only available in native beforeSend that is fine.

[Legion2]

Is there an equivalent mobile API for the javascript Replay.start/stop/flush apis? https://docs.sentry.io/platforms/javascript/session-replay/understanding-sessions/#manually-flushing-recording-data

[jas-kas]

Hey @Legion2, there is not an equivalent mobile API just yet. We're working on a similar request to pause/resume recordings here: #63248

[Legion2]

I need the flush API in particular, to allow users to manually report problems in the UI

[jas-kas]

Gotcha! Follow up ticket for flush API: #78018

[Legion2]

I use RN session replays and configured session replay with errorSampleRate = 1.0 but don't get replays when the error is captured in js. If the error is captured in native it will create a replay.

[romtsn]

how do you capture an error exactly? I believe the event should contain exceptions to be qualified as error: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-react-native/blob/fd21b24ddb99bff181a50c4fca9f0c88846cf022/src/js/replay/mobilereplay.ts#L81-L85

[Legion2]

thanks for the reference I will check that

[Legion2]

OK found my error, I removed Sentry.mobileReplayIntegration() from js because I moved all the initialization of the replay stuff to native, but Sentry.mobileReplayIntegration() is still needed in js to trigger the replay on js errors.

[Legion2]

I now added it back to js and it sometimes triggers a replay for an js error.

[felipenwelter]

Do you have any plans on the timeline for releasing an official version?

[bruno-garcia]

The current plan is to GA sometime in November. We'll share the official date soon.

[jas-kas]

^ Update to this, we're looking at Jan 2025.

[Legion2]

Thread Performance Checker: Thread running at User-initiated quality-of-service class waiting on a lower QoS thread running at Default quality-of-service class. Investigate ways to avoid priority inversions
0   App                                 0x0000000106c6ca48 $s6Sentry0A14OnDemandReplayC11renderVideo33_70FE3B80E922CEF5576FF378226AFAE1LL4with4from2atAA0aF4InfoCSgSayAA0aD5FrameVG_Siz10Foundation3URLVtKF + 2132
1   App                                 0x0000000106c6be34 $s6Sentry0A14OnDemandReplayC15createVideoWith9beginning3endSayAA0aF4InfoCG10Foundation4DateV_ALtKF + 1284
2   App                                 0x0000000106c6c0c0 $s6Sentry0A14OnDemandReplayC15createVideoWith9beginning3endSayAA0aF4InfoCG10Foundation4DateV_ALtKFTo + 228
3   App                                 0x0000000106c86984 $s6Sentry0A13SessionReplayC16createAndCapture33_0C34F63BF2CAC7EBBCDDA9F08A50850ALL9startedAt10replayTypey10Foundation4DateV_AA0acQ0OtFyycfU_ + 500
4   App                                 0x0000000106c48e84 $sIeg_IeyB_TR + 48
5   App                                 0x0000000106ba3268 __53-[SentryDispatchQueueWrapper dispatchAsyncWithBlock:]_block_invoke + 56
6   libdispatch.dylib                   0x00000001101bca30 _dispatch_call_block_and_release + 32
7   libdispatch.dylib                   0x00000001101be71c _dispatch_client_callout + 20
8   libdispatch.dylib                   0x00000001101c65e8 _dispatch_lane_serial_drain + 828
9   libdispatch.dylib                   0x00000001101c7360 _dispatch_lane_invoke + 408
10  libdispatch.dylib                   0x00000001101d45f0 _dispatch_root_queue_drain_deferred_wlh + 328
11  libdispatch.dylib                   0x00000001101d3c00 _dispatch_workloop_worker_thread + 580
12  libsystem_pthread.dylib             0x00000002280bfc7c _pthread_wqthread + 288
13  libsystem_pthread.dylib             0x00000002280bc488 start_wqthread + 8

I get the following warning in xcode when using session replay on ios.

[bruno-garcia]

@brustolin have we seen this one?

[brustolin]

I will take a look

[brustolin]

This will be fixed in the next version