

Watchsend (YC S13) records mobile screen interactions for user testing - zan2434
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/08/yc-backed-watchsend-records-mobile-screen-interactions-for-user-testing/

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DTE
How can you take privacy seriously[0] when there is the option to capture full
screenshots and send them back to the dev team? That is absolutely not an
expected behavior of any app. Am I not understanding something here?

[0] "We take privacy seriously. You can choose to hide sensitive information,
only record certain sections of your app, or even pixelate out all text
entirely."

Edit: added source of claim

Edit 2: To clarify: I don't mean to diminish the hard work of the team. I know
how hard it is to put your work out there and I'm sure there was a lot of
interesting technical work that went in to it. That said, I really think the
premise is troubling, especially if it is intended beyond a "beta tester"
group. Even with the best intentions, this is a really powerful tool that
could be easily abused.

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igul222
Cofounder here. We're a service that helps app developers understand their
users in order to make their apps better. Like almost any other service that
collects and stores data, it's possible to intentionally misuse Watchsend in
ways that grossly violate users' privacy.

What we mean by "we take privacy seriously" is that we work really hard to
make sure that devs who care about their users' privacy can use Watchsend to
make their apps better without infringing on their users' privacy. At the end
of the day, if a developer wants to spy on their users, there's very little we
(or anyone else) can do about it.

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abhiv
This could be really great. Watching users interact with your product directly
provides a whole different level of insight.

A few things that I can think of that they may already be considering:

1\. Asking the developer to specify explicitly which screens should be
recorded. From the article, it seems like it's opt-out (the developer
specifies which screens should _not_ be recorded), rather than opt-in.

2\. Showing long recordings at high speed, slowing down/pausing at
"interesting" portions

3\. Data aggregated across multiple users: for example, a report of places in
the app where most users pause the longest

4\. Displays of multiple users' interactions with a single screen, overlaid on
top of each other

5\. Dealing with user offline scenarios where data may need to be locally
stored and then uploaded when a connection is available

They must be doing some sort of frame delta on the videos to save bandwidth,
I'm assuming.

Very cool idea!

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alook
Agreed on 2-5, the state of how we collect data on in-app activity seems to
totally miss the point of context.

Something where we collect visual data on live user sessions seems like it may
open the door to getting a deeper understanding of what users are actually
doing in our apps!

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gailees
Woah. This is going to change the game.

Rapid iteration on mobile is tough enough...as long as this doesn't have too
big of a hit on performance, this is about to change the way we develop mobile
apps.

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rjvir
Can't think of a better way to understand your users than to watch them use
your app in real time. Implementing this in all my apps right now.

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d0m
Looks neat! I'm wondering how big is the market for this kind of service?
Seems very valuable for early startups/products imho.

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alexschiff
The first paragraph was all it took to convince me to send this to our design
team.

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atlex2
Works skippingly for identifying users' reasons for app failures.

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Terpaholic
Congrats on the launch! Sharp team and great product :)

