Every day, we encounter bugs in mobile apps. They may lock up or perform in a way we didn’t expect, but what if you could report the bug to developers as it happened with all of the contextual information they need to fix the problem? That’s the mission behind Buglife (https://www.buglife.com/), a member of the Winter 2018 Y Combinator class.
The founders, Dan DeCovnick and Dave Schukin, came up with an early iteration of the idea in 2011 while both were working at Amazon developing a music player for the iPhone. They found while beta testing the software that people would run into problems like music not streaming in certain situations, and would email them. But they lacked context about what was happening on the phone when the problem happened.
They built some elementary tooling while at Amazon to help capture that data, but the same problem popped up at subsequent jobs at Yammer and Twitter, and he said he kept seeing the same reporting hole.
Buglife launched in 2016 to productize their bug reporting tool idea. They joined Y Combinator last month. The way the service works is that developers embed the Buglife SDK in their iOS or Android app. When a user encounters a bug, they can simply shake the phone, or the developers can choose different a way to enter the Buglife workflow. Then they can take a screenshot, draw an arrow to the bug and a enter a note about it. Buglife captures all related information like capture logs, network info and routes it to Jira or Slack to provide developers with rich bug reports in the reporting tools they are used to using.
Schukin said that Buglife is more about user feedback/crowdsourcing the types of bugs which are difficult to automate. If you’re worried about the privacy implications of taking a screenshot and sending it to developers, Schukin says they have set it up so that sensitive data like phone numbers and credit card numbers will be blurred out when the screenshot is taken.
The company reports some good early traction with over 300 apps embedding their bug-reporting SDK. They charge on a per app per month basis with a free pricing tier for indie and open source developers. They have an enterprise pricing level to help companies with more complex integrations.
As for the future, the company wants to be the solution for developers to collect mobile app bug information from the world.
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