One thing surprised me after years of building mobile apps.
The bugs that consumed the most engineering time were rarely the most difficult bugs.
The fixes were often simple.
The investigation was the expensive part.
A Typical Conversation
QA:
"Login is failing for some users."
Frontend:
"I can't reproduce it."
Backend:
"I don't see anything unusual in the logs."
QA sends screenshots.
Frontend asks for more details.
Backend asks for request payloads.
Someone records a video.
Someone else tries to reproduce the issue.
Hours pass.
Sometimes days.
Eventually, the root cause turns out to be something trivial:
- An expired token
- A missing header
- A malformed request body
- A backend validation rule
The fix takes five minutes.
The investigation took two days.
The Real Problem Isn't The Bug
The real problem is visibility.
When an issue happens on a mobile device, every team sees only part of the picture.
- QA sees the error
- Frontend sees the code
- Backend sees server logs
Nobody sees the complete request and response that caused the problem.
As a result, teams spend most of their time collecting evidence instead of fixing the issue.
Screenshots Aren't Enough
For years our workflow looked like this:
- Screenshot from QA
- Screen recording
- Console logs
- Slack messages
- Guessing
The problem is that screenshots don't contain enough information.
A screenshot cannot tell you:
- Which headers were sent
- Which payload was submitted
- Which response was returned
- Whether authentication failed
- Whether the request even reached the server
Yet these are exactly the details engineers need.
What Changed Everything
The biggest improvement came when we started sharing traffic logs instead of screenshots.
Instead of saying:
Login failed.
QA could share:
- Request URL
- Headers
- Request Body
- Response Body
- HTTP Status Code
Now frontend and backend engineers were looking at the same evidence.
✅ No guessing
✅ No interpretation
✅ Just facts
Suddenly issues became much easier to reproduce.
The Impact
The result wasn't fewer bugs.
The result was faster investigations.
Instead of spending hours asking questions, teams could immediately focus on solving the actual problem.
What surprised me most was how often communication, not code, was the bottleneck.
The technical fix was usually straightforward.
Getting everyone aligned on what actually happened was the difficult part.
What We Changed
After running into this workflow repeatedly, our team started capturing and sharing traffic logs directly from mobile devices.
The goal wasn't better debugging tools.
The goal was reducing the time it took QA, frontend engineers and backend engineers to understand the same issue.
Once everyone could see the exact request and response, investigations became dramatically faster.
The feature was traffic inspection.
The outcome was better collaboration.
Final Thoughts
Many engineering teams spend far more time investigating bugs than fixing them.
If your bug reports still rely on screenshots, screen recordings and Slack threads, there may be an easier way.
The most valuable debugging information is often the request and response that triggered the issue.
Everything else is just context.
How does your team currently handle API-related bug investigations?
Do you rely on screenshots, logs, traffic captures, or something else?
canonical_url: https://moniproxy.com/blog/why-mobile-bugs-take-days-to-reproduce
