Case Study: Timehop achieves minutes-to-root-cause detection of user-impacting issues with Embrace

Timehop uses Embrace to reduce the time to detection of user-impacting issues to minutes

Timehop, a digital-nostalgia app that aggregates users’ past social media memories, faced frequent user‑impacting issues across many integrations (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google Photos, iCloud, etc.) while operating with a very small mobile team. Their existing tools (Firebase, Fabric) only helped with crashes and provided limited logs, so Timehop turned to Embrace and its Session Replay capability to get richer, session‑level context for non‑fatal problems like slow or blank screens and failing network calls.

Embrace implemented unsampled session replay with detailed technical events (network calls, logs, view/activity timelines and ANR labeling), enabling Timehop developers to visually reproduce problem sessions and pinpoint root causes. As a result, Timehop can go from a user complaint to identifying the cause in minutes — turnaround time to determine a problem is around 10 minutes — greatly reducing investigation time and allowing the small team to focus on building features.

Timehop

Jason Sznol

Lead Android Engineer