Show HN: Waldo Sessions: Run, Inspect, Share mobile sessions from the browser

[edelans]

https://www.waldo.com/sessions

Hi HN,

PM at Waldo here.

We are launching Waldo Sessions: a tool to run, inspect and share mobile sessions from your browser.

Waldo provides a fresh device (in the configuration of your choosing), you upload a build and can begin interacting with your app through your browser. Network calls and console logs load in real time alongside your device.

Sessions are automatically recorded and stored as a Replay: video playback, the timeline of gestures, device details, network activity, and logs. Replays can be shared with your team, providing the context required to debug faster.

If you work on mobile apps (as a dev, QA, PM, or designer), please try it out and tell me what you think! Sessions and Replays are available for free, and we even provide demo apps for you to upload and test the product.

Happy to answer any questions!

[vbfox]

Software developer on the product here, I handled parts of the storage backend on this one and it presented some fun challenges.

Waldo already had features to stream logs and requests in the Sessions (Previously named "Live") view of the application and to save them so that they can be downloaded during automated tests but both features were heavily scoped toward their specific usage and Sessions meant that we needed to save all of theses in a way that we could keep them forever and show them as fast as possible when a replay is requested (With the ability to seek into them and advance all of that in sync with the video).

The previous storage was a JSONL text file (One log entry per line in JSON object format) but there was no way to use it as-is in a web viewer and get it to be fast-enough.

The full system log of a session can be up to 1Go of data (It's essentially logcat output in JSON format for android) that need to be filtered and accessible in small batches both by index when scrolling and by time when seeking the video.

Our current solution is based on having compressed Apache Arrow Columnar Format (IPC files) as long term storage and a server that caches filtered versions in-memory and full versions on disk when requested, along with a client that can load subsets of theses arrow files (Using apache-arrow npm package)

[sebastienrouif]

getting context on bug reports are such a pain on mobile, replays would be super useful for nailing bug reports

[edelans → sebastienrouif]

thanks @sebastienrouif for bringing that up! Comprehensive bug reports is indeed one of the big use case we expect.

Imagine if the support team could spin up the same device mentioned in the customer ticket, reproduce the bug, and then just share the replay with the dev. No more painful back n forth with the dev ("sry, can't reproduce, what was the device again?"). And the dev gets the whole info he needs (annotated recording, steps to reproduce, device & OS version) to reproduce, and even some info to start investigating (app logs and network requests). It's like making your support team score hole-in-ones every time they tee off. We just slashed the time to fix.