Inkitt Reduced App Crashes by 33% Through Optimizations and CodeSee Automations

Inkitt - a series B digital publishing platform that allows writers to share their stories with readers experienced crashes that affected the user experience. Inkitt is an incredible platform with a large and engaged user base. Its unique approach to content discovery and its free writing contest help to set it apart from its competitors. So this issue was a huge priority for Ben Wilson - Director of Engineering and the team. The app encountered on average 1,000 crashes per week and up to 3,000 at it’s peak.

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The primary cause of these crashes was traced back to the use of deprecated components and inefficient animations. The development team urgently needed to implement a solution, tell the team to use the new component and enforce that global team didn’t use the old component again in the future.  But once the issue was fixed, it needed to be implemented and scaled across the team so that it never happened again. That’s where CodeSee comes in.

The team decided to implement a touch opacity catch and adopted the Reanimated library. They then created a CodeSee Automation to enforce a rule that if a team member tried to use the old component, the PR would be blocked and the teammate would be told to use the new component instead.

After implementing the new components and a CodeSee Automation, the development team managed to reduce the app's overall crash rate by 33%. There was no documentation to check, no re-doing the work, no reminders that the team needed to provide the team. CodeSee Automations ensured that the Inkitt team prevented solved issues from reemerging, and that each engineer knows what they need to know about their code when they need to know it, completely automatically.