Crashes, unexpected changes in user behavior, and a flood of new user ratings and reviews.

These are a few of the reasons why the work of releasing an update to your mobile app continues well after the update is live. Your mobile team's job isn't done until you've verified that the new release is stable and performing well for all users, with no negative impact on revenue or other key metrics.

To catch problems in their tracks, teams turn to a range of different measures of release health. The most common metrics teams monitor during rollouts involve the app's software stability-like crash-free user and crash-free session rates or out-of-memory crashes-plus measures of performance like network latency and startup times. Most of these are easily available with out-of-the-box stability and performance monitoring tools.

But a holistic view of release health requires more than measuring how your app is doing on a technical level. There are second-order effects to monitor during releases that may not be as obviously tied to the code that shipped. For example, check user behavior for any regressions-think signups, checkouts, and other important conversions-and track certain key performance indicators (KPIs) against each release. Digital analytics platforms like Amplitude can help here. Finally, signals from the app stores, such as user ratings and reviews, can also be early indicators of issues in the latest release.

Clearly, there are many things to keep tabs on to run a healthy mobile release-or to run an unhealthy one that still ends up with a good outcome! Given various tools and stakeholders are involved, how can your mobile team set up for success and run rollouts confidently and with full visibility? In this post, we'll look at some best practices.