With the wide range of Android devices, it can be difficult to find the root cause of performance problems. By leveraging traces, we can begin to understand the exact circumstances that led to a poor user experience. We will discuss how we instrument our Snapchat app such that we can have the necessary signals for explainability. Additionally, we will describe how we incorporate tracing into our development process from local debugging, to performance tests and finally in production.

In this Droidcon SF session, engineers from Snapchat's module infrastructure team will talk about various strategies that Snapchat uses to ensure quality for its new Android application, which has hundreds of active contributors across dozens of individual teams. The talk will show how proper attribution of application resources (from CPU and app size to frame rate) can be an effective tool for monitoring app performance and preventing regressions.