App downtime and performance issues cost businesses thousands to millions per hour in lost revenue and developer time. Traditional debugging tools often only help after issues disrupt production, leading to expensive fixes and delays.
The Kotzilla Platform helps Kotlin developers prevent these losses by:
You’ve seen it happen before, your app is running smoothly until suddenly, it’s not.
Users start reporting issues. Performance slows down. Your team drops everything to investigate. Hours or even days are spent looking into logs, adding traces, and trying to pinpoint the problem.
By the time you finally fix it, the damage is done:
In this article, I’ll break down the hidden costs of downtime, why traditional debugging tools often fall short, and how early detection can save your team time, money, and frustration. I’ll also introduce you to Kotzilla, a platform designed to help you catch and fix issues before they ever reach production.
Downtime isn’t just about your app being unavailable. It has a domino effect:
And the numbers prove just how costly this can be:
The second something breaks in production, the clock starts ticking.
Every hour spent troubleshooting is an hour taken away from building new features. That’s why Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) is such an important metric:
Most debugging tools are reactive and they only help you after an issue has already disrupted production.
According to The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), fixing an error during the design phase can cost up to 100 times less than fixing it after deployment (source: NIST)
To truly optimize performance and prevent downtime, it’s important to:
Imagine that you release an update, and suddenly, your app starts to get slow. Some users experience freezes, others complain about slow loading times. You check your monitoring dashboard.
An ANR alert pops up. Great! But what caused it?
There’s a delay, but no clear link to the actual component responsible. You click on more details to see additional info in dedicated troubleshooting views. A lot of information is shown, but no clear data about the issue or its impact on the main thread execution.
In fact, the troubleshooting view showed a lot of activity related to coroutines execution, which didn't add much value related to this issue.
So, you start guessing. Which component or dependency could be blocking the main thread? You introduce manual tracing in some components. More time spent adding custom spans, rebuilding, testing. Eventually, you find the problem: a ViewModel initialization blocking the main thread.
Now, imagine a background task slowing down silently, not enough to trigger an ANR but still affecting performance. Traditional tools don’t even register it if this is related to a slow component or dependency resolution. You only discover the problem when users complain.
The same happens with dependency resolution issues. If a slow dependency is dragging down startup time, most tools won’t tell you why, just that something is wrong. You’re left manually mapping dependencies, adding even more logging, just to figure out what should have been obvious.
This is the core problem:
The Kotzilla Platform is designed to help you see how your app behaves in real-time, linking issues to the specific components, dependencies, and threads they run on. Whether you’re debugging during development or dealing with a production crisis, the platform makes sure you understand both the symptom and the root cause behind the issue so you can fix it quickly.
Here are the main components of the Kotzilla Platform:
As your app grows and its dependency graph becomes more complex, small configuration errors can start to appear, unnoticed at first but potentially causing big issues down the line. The Koin IDE Plugin is here to catch those issues:
By connecting directly to your Koin container, the SDK captures real-time data on how your components and dependencies execute. Whether you’re testing a new feature in your debug builds or debugging a live app in production, Kotzilla ensures you can detect critical issues and structural inefficiencies before they escalate:
The Kotzilla Console is where you can further investigate not just what went wrong, but why it happened in the first place:
Let’s go back to our previous scenario. You remember: you release an update, and suddenly, your app starts to slow down.
You check the Kotzilla Console or your Android Studio through the Koin IDE Plugin, and see a "Main Thread Performance Issue" detected.
The issue already contains the exact component responsible for the slowdown:
com.google.samples.apps.nowinandroid.MainActivityViewModelNo more guessing. No need to manually add traces or sift through logs. The information you need is already there.
You click on the issue to investigate further:
To analyze the root cause, you open one of the impacted user sessions and drill down into the sequence of events that led to the issue. The execution flow visualization reveals that he actual source of the issue isn’t the ViewModel itself, it’s one of its dependencies, the UserRepository dependency.
You can now take immediate action by offloading heavy data processing such as large dataset operations like filtering or mapping from the main thread to a background thread.
As discussed in previous sections, the true cost of issues in your Kotlin app isn't just about how much time you spend fixing them. It's about the broader impact on your bottom line, from lost revenue to wasted developer hours, and the long-term scalability of your app.
The Kotzilla platform has been specifically designed for Kotlin developers using Koin, providing full visibility into how components and dependencies interact within your app. Whether you’re debugging in development or troubleshooting live production issues, Kotzilla ensures you have the real-time data and insights needed to diagnose and resolve problems quickly, avoiding the costs of downtime, performance degradation, and inefficient debugging processes.
Let’s break down the key areas where the platform provides measurable cost savings:
Annual savings = cost of downtime per hour × downtime hours prevented
Production cost = average cost to fix in production × number of issues
Development cost = average cost to fix in production / 100 × number of issuesAnnual savings = production cost − development cost
While Kotzilla helps prevent many issues during development, some problems will still happen in production, especially those that only occur on specific hardware models, OS versions, or device configurations. Kotzilla’s platform enables quicker detection and resolution of these issues, leading to important cost savings by reducing both Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and developer time spent debugging.
Total Cost = (number of issues remaining × average cost to fix in production) + (number of issues remaining × MTTR × average developer hourly rate) + total logging costs.
Savings = total cost (without Kotzilla Platform) - total cost (with Kotzilla Platform)
The true cost of app issues isn’t just the time spent fixing them, but the impact on revenue, customer satisfaction, and team productivity. Traditional debugging tools often leave you reacting to problems in production after the fact. With the Kotzilla Platform, you can identify and resolve a lot of critical and structural issues early before they escalate.
By providing deep visibility into your app’s components and dependencies, the platform helps you avoid the high costs of fixing issues in production, reduce downtime, and save on both developer time and expensive debugging efforts.