Android Mobile Observability with OpenTelemetry
A user opens a ticket: "the app froze when I tried to upload a photo." They were on the metro, on cellular, on a Samsung Galaxy A54 running Android 13. You're on a Pixel 8 on office Wi-Fi and the upload completes in 400 ms every time you try it. Crashlytics says "no crash logged." Play Console ANR rate looks normal. Was it the network? A frozen frame that swallowed the tap? A backend timeout? An OOM kill on a device with 4 GB of RAM and a busy launcher?
You can't tell. None of the tools you have were built to answer that question.
This is the gap OpenTelemetry fills on Android. Backend services have had distributed tracing for a decade. The mobile app, the thing the user actually touches, gets crash reports and a five-row Play Console dashboard. We've spent the last year helping teams close that gap with the OpenTelemetry Android Agent, and this post is a deep walkthrough of what it solves, how to wire it up, and how to ship the data to a collector you control.