Modern apps broke observability. Here’s how we fix it.

For years, APM tools were everyone’s go-to solution for understanding how software behaved in production. And for a time, they worked, because architecture was simpler. Developers owned the backend, the frontend, and the data layer. Everything lived inside a monolith. If something went wrong, they could trace it through their codebase and fix it.

The rise of mobile apps changed that.

Mobile applications are distributed and API-driven. They use third-party integrations and system components we don’t always control. Yet many observability tools are still rooted in legacy development assumptions, focused on infrastructure and backend performance, not on what mobile users actually experience.

The result? Developers are flying blind when it comes to how their customers are experiencing the application.

Where Traditional Observability Falls Short

Legacy APM tools capture metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, and backend API calls. But they rarely capture what’s happening when a mobile app is in the user’s hands. That gap is costing companies—both in customer satisfaction and developer efficiency.

Think of a shopping app where you click “pay,” and it takes several seconds to respond. Backend APIs may be technically functional, but the user thinks the app is frozen, and leaves. Traditional observability doesn’t catch that kind of delay because no clear error is thrown. But the damage to your brand and revenue is real. Research has found that 70% of consumers say page speed impacts willingness to buy online.

For developers, figuring out where things went wrong is difficult. In a survey looking at the biggest challenges to observability, 58% of developers said that identifying blind spots is a top concern. Stack traces may help, but they rarely provide enough context to diagnose issues quickly; developers chase down screenshots, reproduce problems, and piece together clues manually using the metric and log data from APM tools; a bug that could take 30 minutes to fix ends up consuming days or weeks.

Meanwhile, telemetry data accumulates in massive volumes—expensive to store and hard to interpret. Without tools to turn data into insight, you’re left with three problems: high bills, burnout (something that nearly 75% of developers have experienced in their career), and time wasted fixing bugs—bugs that don’t have a major impact on core business functions or drive revenue when increasing developer efficiency is a top strategic goal at organizations.

Where Observability Needs to Go

To support mobile applications, observability needs a reset. Here’s where it must evolve:

1. User-Centric Observability: We need to observe what users experience, not just what systems report. This means tracking frontend responsiveness, screen load times, failed interactions, and perceived slowness. Observability should help answer: Did the user accomplish what they came to do, and how painful was it to get there? Whether it’s a screen that loads slowly or a payment screen that feels stuck, observability must help teams detect and diagnose issues that users notice, even if no error is thrown.
2. Developer-First Tools: Many legacy monitoring tools are built for infrastructure teams, not for developers. But developers need insights into code-level behavior, distributed API flows, and how user interactions trigger or stall app behavior. Observability tools should support real workflows, offering contextual traces and end-to-end visibility from user action to backend response.
3. Smarter, More Relevant Data: It’s not about collecting more data—it’s about collecting the right Collecting petabytes of telemetry leads to storage costs and decision fatigue. Instead, observability should surface meaningful signals: when performance drops, memory leaks begin, or usage patterns shift. Contextual relevance beats raw volume every time.
4. A Cultural Shift Is Needed: More than anything, we need a cultural change. Observability must be built into products from the start. That means thinking early about how we’ll track adoption, usage, and outcomes—not just deliver features. Too often, teams ship functionality only to find no one is using it. Observability should show whether users ever saw the feature, where they dropped off, or what got in the way. That kind of visibility doesn’t come from backend logs alone.

These four shifts define what modern observability must become to support today’s applications, and ultimately, users.

Moving to Modern Observability Can’t Wait

We’re building more complex mobile apps in faster cycles for more demanding customers. Legacy observability approaches don’t provide the clarity needed for developers to make swift, educated decisions. It’s time to shift from backend-centric to user-centric, from data overload to actionable insight.

Observability isn’t about watching servers anymore. It’s about understanding experiences so we can deliver software that works the way users expect.

This article originally appeared on DevPro Journal. We’re sharing it here for our audience who may have missed it.