Introducing Session Replay for mobile applications

Every tap that went nowhere. Every swipe that did not change screens. Every rage click that ultimately led to that customer bouncing from your app. 

It all quickly adds up to cement a poor customer experience — and so do the economic consequences.

But how do you fix a problem if you do not know exactly where and how things went wrong? After all, log and crash reports don’t show what users actually experienced, making mobile issues nearly impossible to reproduce, severely limiting your mobile app from becoming a critical revenue driver.

That’s why New Relic is excited to announce session replay for mobile applications: a visual replay of every tap, swipe, and interaction done on your app. ​​Replays are automatically synced to logs and breadcrumbs, and can also be viewed in Transaction 360 alongside data from your entire stack for faster root-cause analysis. Users can review replays alongside detailed granular telemetry data behind every click and swipe.

Identifying and troubleshooting issues with your mobile application just became a whole lot easier.

Seamless enablement with unmatched cost control.

We designed mobile session replay to make onboarding seamless with just a few clicks on the New Relic platform: all you need to do is update to the latest agent and navigate to the Application Settings page to enable the mobile session replay feature. 

To ensure you aren’t capturing noise, we provide granular sampling controls that allow you to balance deep visibility with budget predictability:

• Total user sessions for a record of random samples across all user sessions. The default is 10%, but this is configurable.
• Error-driven samples to get a random sample of where at least one error occurred. With this sampling option, the agent buffers a sliding window of data for up to 30 seconds on the client side, and if errors occur, the buffered data will be harvested and the remainder of the session will be recorded. If no error occurs, then the replay is never harvested. The default is 100%, but this is configurable.

With simple, ingest-based pricing and the ability to trigger recordings via API, you take full command of your telemetry pipeline. You decide what's worth seeing. And you’re billed on data ingest rather than individual sessions, so your costs align directly with your troubleshooting activity.

Visualizing the entire user journey

Telemetry data on its own provides only a certain level of insight; seeing it all pieced together by witnessing how the user actually used the app from start to finish is critical to creating the best user experience possible.

New Relic session replay enables teams to visually understand real user behavior done on their mobile apps with a video replay of what the end user saw on their phone or tablet, all synchronized alongside the frontend and backend telemetry data generated during that session.

Here’s how session replay works:

1. Configuration & Initialization

When the app launches, the Mobile Agent checks New Relic for your specific settings (sampling rates and privacy rules) to decide if the session should be captured.

2. Native-to-HTML Transformation

Since mobile apps lack a DOM, the agent monitors the view lifecycle and converts the native viewport into an HTML reproduction in real-time.

3. Privacy Masking & Data Harvesting

Privacy masking is applied to the HTML before it is serialized into JSON. This data is stored locally and sent to New Relic in compressed "harvest" cycles every 60 seconds.

4. Reconstruction & Playback

When viewed in the dashboard, the JSON is deserialized back into a stream of HTML updates, intentionally keeping the data requirement low by creating a reconstructed video-like recording of the user’s session.

Privacy, front and center

Given the nature of mobile apps — commerce, banking, healthcare, and reward programs, just to name a few — Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is often processed. That’s why we developed mobile session replay with the most stringent security and masking controls to give your users the privacy they demand.

All masking occurs client-side, ensuring sensitive data never leaves the user's device. You can choose between two main strategies:

1. Default Masking Strategy

This is the standard approach for maximum security.

• What it does: Masks all text (e.g., hello becomes “*****”) and replaces all images with placeholders.
• Why use it: It ensures no personal data is collected. To maintain this standard, custom overrides (like nr-unmask tags) are disabled.

2. Custom Masking Strategy

Use this if you need specific text to be readable or images to be visible. You can toggle the following three modes:

• Mask User Input: When enabled, everything a user types becomes asterisks. When disabled, their input is readable. Note: Passwords are always masked.
• Mask Application Text: When enabled, all text displayed by your app (like labels or headers) is hidden. When disabled, this text is visible in the replay.
• Mask Images: When enabled, images are replaced by placeholders. When disabled, images are captured and displayed.

Taking user security even further, mobile session replay is built with both locally configured and server-side privacy overrides. If a mistake is made in your sampling or privacy settings, you don’t need to push out a new version of the app that fixes that mistake — and wait for the end users to adopt that updated version — for the new privacy settings to take effect.

The end of guesswork is here

New Relic mobile session replay is now Generally Available, creating a powerful debugging and troubleshooting tool that gives developers what they previously never had: direct insight into what their mobile app users are experiencing–the good, the bad, and everything in between. 

With mobile session replay, New Relic users can start gaining unprecedented insights into their customers in 3 easy steps:

1. Navigate to the Application Settings page in New Relic
2. Enable the Mobile Session Replay feature
3. Configure sampling rates and privacy settings as needed.

It’s as simple as that.

Don’t have a New Relic account? Sign up for your free account and check out session replay today.