Introducing Session Replay for Mobile Applications

At the beginning of 2024, we added Session Replay to our Digital Analytics Platform as a powerful tool for analyzing web experiences. Session Replay has enabled our customers to identify friction on websites and web applications so they can innovate and create better experiences. Product teams use Session Replay to review new feature adoption, and growth teams use it to improve campaign performance and conversions.

Today, we are excited to extend Session Replay to mobile applications—iOS, Android Views, React Native and, soon to come, Jet Pack Compose—for all Amplitude customers.

Why mobile matters

As mobile becomes increasingly critical to the user experience, businesses need the best tools to improve their mobile apps. Amplitude’s Mobile Session Replay is designed for teams that want to gain deep insights into mobile app interactions.

By offering a high-quality, cost-effective Session Replay solution that’s integrated with our entire platform, we’re helping teams better understand how users engage with their apps so they can enhance mobile experiences.

Different paths to mobile replays

In the mobile app analytics space, there are several ways to approach session replay—and some are better than others.

Creating replays from screenshots

Some tools take screenshots every second and stitch them together to create a session replay. While this method might sound simple, it comes with significant downsides. The capture size becomes enormous, leading to high storage and operational costs. The replays also tend to be choppy and don’t fully capture the mobile app’s fluid, interactive experience.

Screenshot replays create a disjointed view of your user’s experience and may skip key moments.

Creating replays from wireframes

Another standard method is wireframes, where smaller app components—such as images, text, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.—are converted to their HTML equivalents. This approach is more efficient than screenshots but results in incomplete replays. Customers often report that these replays are missing key moments that help tell the full story.

Wireframe replays don’t accurately portray what the user experiences, creating gaps in your understanding.

The Amplitude way

At Amplitude, we took a different approach. Our guiding philosophy was to build mobile replays that could do three things:

• Provide complete replays that are as close to the user’s true experience as possible
• Build smooth animations so the replay is fluid
• Ensure no noticeable overhead on app performance

The result? Our mobile replay experience is seamless and has no lag, so teams can experience accurate replays. Thanks to our efficient data capture, we can offer mobile Session Replay without high operational costs and without sacrificing app performance. Teams can now access detailed insights into mobile user behavior while keeping costs down.

With Amplitude, you can see exactly what your users experience.

Mobile Session Replay makes Amplitude’s platform better

Mobile Session Replay adds an essential layer of qualitative insights to Amplitude’s already powerful quantitative data, helping teams understand why users behave the way they do. By combining replay data with Amplitude’s Experiments, Guides and Surveys, and more, teams can quickly move from identifying issues to testing, guiding, and gathering user feedback in real time. This integrated approach enables businesses to optimize mobile experiences faster.

Turning insights into action in one seamless workflow is now available as part of Session Replay Everywhere. With Session Replay integrated across the entire platform, you’re never more than a click away from visual insights into user engagement—whether you’re looking at a chart, examining experiment results, or reviewing survey responses.

With these added Session Replay capabilities, Amplitude strengthens its position as the go-to platform for understanding, optimizing, and iterating on the complete customer journey—across both web and mobile experiences.

Getting started with mobile Session Replay

Mobile Session Replay is available for all Amplitude customers across all plan types. Simply follow these instructions to get started.