Wellness Leader Wellhub Chooses Sentry for their React Native Mobile App

Wellhub (formerly Gympass) is a corporate wellness platform that connects individuals to gyms, classes, and coaches for better physical and mental well-being. With Wellhub, companies can offer employees subscriptions as part of an overall benefits package. Founded in 2012, Wellhub now serves over 18,000 corporate clients and 3 million employee subscribers.

Wellhub developers build apps for multiple audiences (employers, partners, and individuals). Still, their main focus is the Wellhub mobile app for employees who use it to book classes and check benefits.

Challenges with other solutions

When they started out as a small team, Wellhub chose to build their mobile app with React Native. This allowed their JavaScript developers to maintain only one code base instead of two, and avoid the need for a mobile-specific developer team. They started with defaults for monitoring their mobile app, but., as they grew, they started to run into an increasing number of challenges with the default solution, making it difficult to identify and solve crashes and errors.

With limited support for React Native, their existing monitoring solution had three major challenges:

1. They were not able to quickly and accurately contextualize issues because of the lack of a user interface that provided detailed insights into specific devices, users, and libraries affected by errors or crashes.
2. Source Maps were not handled effectively, often resulting in minified stack traces that can be difficult to read.
3. When debugging, they couldn’t easily identify the original code owner, making it hard to assign the right developer to the crash to solve it quickly. The tool also lacked essential collaboration features, preventing developers from easily assigning issues or sharing direct links to the root causes with colleagues.

To make sure they continued to deliver a stable, crash-free app to their users, they knew they needed a better monitoring solution.

Honing in on an effective monitoring solution

Tech Lead Guilherme Costa and the Wellhub team embarked on a search for an alternative solution. After considering a few options, Sentry emerged as a highly recommended choice among the team’s mobile developers.

According to Guilherme, “Sentry was widely endorsed and familiar among developers, making our decision straightforward.” Given their use of React Native, transitioning to Sentry was a logical step (according to a recent third-party survey, Sentry is the recognized leader in React Native crash reporting). As Guilherme explained, “Basically, Sentry was the go-to, and a lot of devs had experience, so the decision was easy.”

In the coming months, Wellhub plans to move to React Native’s New Architecture and is using Sentry to facilitate that transition and ship confidently. Overall, the move to Sentry has been a win-win for the team at Wellhub. Again, Guilherme Costa, “Sentry was highly recommended by mobile developers, including my team’s developers.”

Solving errors and crashes, fast

With deeper context into crashes and errors, including breadcrumbs and suspect commits, Guilherme and his team were able to identify and resolve errors and crashes quickly. With Sentry’s industry-leading source map support, Wellhub’s mobile developers could easily use stack traces to speed up their debugging time.

Regarding stability, the ability to track the crash rates of new releases was immensely important. If they saw a lot of issues, they needed to be able to stop the rollout and solve the issue before it affected a lot of users. With Sentry, they could quantify how many users an error or other issue was impacting, giving them the data they needed to prioritize issues and ship confidently.

Better collaboration when debugging

Before adopting Sentry, Wellhub found that other tools made it difficult to collaborate across the organization. Not only was it challenging to share the root cause of an issue with other developers, but they also found it challenging to assign issues to specific owners. With Sentry, they can now more easily comment on issues, tag people, and set owners. They also found that they were able to integrate Sentry with OpsGenie. This means a clear line of responsibility was easy to establish and follow, and issues moved through the detection phase and resolution.

Sentry also gave them more control over what data they could share, compared to other solutions. As Guilherme explains, “Sentry provides us greater data control and facilitates easier sharing with a broader audience. Sentry stands out for its user-friendliness, enabling even non-developers like technical program managers to grasp the insights they need.”

Guilherme was also happy to see Wellhub managers and executives adopt Sentry: “Directors and other high-level stakeholders use Sentry project pages (and filter by releases) in large company forums to show the success of rollouts and the app’s performance.”

From crash reporting to application performance monitoring and more

While Wellhub primarily used Sentry for crash reporting, they soon discovered that by streamlining many of their development processes, lowering their mean time to resolution, improving collaboration, and speeding up debugging, they found time to expand their use of Sentry into other domains and began to use it to improve performance, mostly focusing on latency and network performance. Guilherme and his team look into requests latency on the performance page and the user misery scores to understand where they can improve user experiences. “Many of my colleagues look at Apdex scores and user misery, as well as screen load times and other Mobile Vitals.”

In addition to focusing on performance, in the coming months, Wellhub plans to move to the latest React Native architecture and is testing it using Sentry to facilitate that transition. As Wellhub continues to scale rapidly, Guilherme and his team continue to look to Sentry for ways to improve internal processes and customer experiences.