Tapps Games increases crash free user rate and improves ratings with Crashlytics and Remote Config
Introduction
Tapps Games is a Brazilian developer with more than 11M monthly active users and a portfolio of 400+ games across multiple categories (arcade, casual, puzzle, simulation, and more). Tapps' mission is to entertain and connect people around the world through amazing games like Vlogger Go Viral, My Boo, and My Virtual Pet Shop.
Challenge
For large game developers like Tapps Games, it's important that users have a stable and high-performing gaming experience. So when the developer team had to add customization options to Vlogger Go Viral's video creation process, they knew they had to keep an eye on the stability of the game's core video creation system in order to have a successful rollout.
In previous updates, the team would identify critical issues during the rollout process by manually searching through reviews and looking for surges in negative reviews. Once they identified any negative reviews, they would go back into their app and try to reproduce the issue with very limited information. This process was very time-consuming, and problems were only detected after already impacting a considerable number of users.
Solution
To ensure all crashes were detected in a timely manner during the rollout of updates to the Vlogger Go Viral game, the team enabled Firebase Crashlytics crash alerts. Crashlytics' velocity alerts made the team immediately aware of an increase in the severity of crashes. This process would usually take days if handled manually through their local software development environment.
After being made aware of the crashes in the game, the Tapps team used the Crashlytics dashboard to investigate top crashes, determine how many users were affected, and identify the root cause of these crashes. Through this process, they realized the update to Vlogger Go Viral's video creation process and a community player event, which was happening simultaneously, had led to one of their screens crashing.
The release team then used Firebase Remote Config to shut down the buggy screen, and used Crashlytics to reproduce and fix the crashes for the next release. Once the crashes were fixed, the Tapps' team used staged rollouts on the Google Play Console to slowly release the new version to a subset of it's players before moving ahead to a full rollout.
Using Firebase Crashlytics and Remote Config during this rollout process, the team was able to increase their crash free user rate from 94.6% to 99.8%, recover up to 5% of player videos that were affected by the crash, and increase their rating on Play Store from 3.9 to 4.7.
Results
Increase in crash free user rate from 94.6% to 99.8%
Increase in Play store rating from 3.9 to 4.7
5% recovery of videos affected by the crash
"Our mission is to entertain and connect people around the world through amazing games, and Firebase is a key partner helping us achieve our mission by giving us the tools to deploy new features faster and with confidence."
- Bruno Domingues, Head of Studio, Tapps Games