Observability and OTA for Android Devices

Memfault uses Android’s batterystats system to record the battery usage of every application on the device, so you can monitor Memfault’s battery life impact yourself through Memfault. In general, we have not seen impact exceed 0.01% a hour.

Memfault also has extension configuration options to disable or delay functionality according to what’s important for your use case.

Memfault as a whole generally uses under 40MB of disk space. The installed apks take up the majority of space, at 15-25MB. The remaining data is usually under 15MB.

Memfault can also be configured to more aggressively maintain the cache size.

Memfault uses Android’s NetworkStatsManager to record the total network usage and of every individual application, so you can monitor Memfault’s network usage yourself through Memfault. In general, you can expect Memfault to use under 1MB of data an hour. Memfault can also be configured to only perform certain operations on unmetered networks to avoid using using data plans.

Memfault for Android works on all AOSP projects. We have customers on Android phones, tablets, kiosks, TVs, and watches.

Memfault for Android only supports OTAs for entire AOSP images. If you’re interested in app-only OTA updates, please contact us!

Memfault can also collect Android bug reports automatically, in addition to its other capabilities.

Generating Android bug reports is often very heavy-handed, producing a zip file several MB in size, often freezing the device for several seconds while the report is generated.

Android bug reports aren’t very customizable, and only contain the data Google has identified to be useful. Memfault is able to collect the same data in Android bug reports like ANRs, stack traces, and tombstones, as well as additional metrics Memfault has identified, and can be configured to collect metrics specific for your product.

Android bug reports are very verbose, and is generally just a way to collect logcat logs. Memfault can also collect logcat logs for your usage if all else fails, but also presents a lot of the information in logs on a timeline, so you can visualize the state changes in the logs to more quickly gather the information.

Android bug reports are a useful debugging tool for a single device, but there is no mechanism for fleet-wide analysis using bug reports. Memfault can group similar issues together to understand how many devices may be impacted. Memfault can also track and slice data like the battery drain, network usage, temperature, disk space, and more, to identify regressions across the entire fleet.

Memfault is the only existing tool that’s specifically targeted for debugging AOSP devices.

Memfault is “bring your own device” (BYOD), so you are not locked into a specific vendor, as long as you have access to the source control.

Our tools are focused on helping AOSP developers understand the performance of devices remotely, and debug issues effectively. Most existing tools are simply focused on MDM–provisioning, identity management, and software updates–and while Memfault is not MDM, it does provide update capabilities for Android devices alongside its other observability tools.

Memfault has out-of-the-box optimizations to make it more suitable for use on a device, such as only performing uploads every hour or on unmetered networks, rate limiting, and more.

Our platform operates on the device-level. Many existing tools operate on the application level, which captures some overlapping information about the performance of specific applications, but less information about the entire device.