FAQ
You will find hereafter answers to common questions. For more details or to get in touch directly, see our contact options.
What is the Kotzilla Platform?
💡 The Kotzilla Platform is a specialised performance monitoring tool for Kotlin developers using Koin. Developed by the creators of the Koin framework, the platform allows you to visualize and resolve performance issues, memory leaks, and architectural app issues, during development and in production.
What’s the magic behind the Kotzilla Platform?
💡 The Kotzilla Platform leverages Koin’s container to automatically detect critical issues such as performance bottlenecks, dependency problems, and crashes, all with minimal overhead and no instrumentation required. These issues are displayed in your IDE, allowing you to quickly identify and resolve them directly from your development environment
Can I use the Kotzilla Platform for free?
💡 Yes, the developer plan is free and includes unlimited time usage of Kotzilla Platform with a limited quota of events. Details available here. No payment details are required.
How does Kotzilla Platform compare to Firebase Performance Monitoring for Kotlin developers?
💡 Unlike Firebase, which requires manual tracing and offers limited insights, Kotzilla Platform provides automatic, real-time performance monitoring built specifically for Kotlin and Koin. It visualizes dependency graphs and monitors components and dependency resolutions across different thread executions. It automatically detects issues and includes graphical tools for root cause analysis with full context. This means faster, deeper insights into your app’s behavior in both development and production, enabling quicker fixes and early signs of performance problems to prevent downtime.
A detailed side-by-side comparison is available here
How is the Kotzilla Platform different from observability tools like Datadog, Sentry or Embrace?
💡 Datadog, Sentry, and Embrace provide broad observability for production crash reporting, error tracking, and monitoring of ANRs, network and database/APIs calls performance. However, they usually require manual instrumentation to trace complex internal app behaviors, especially in Kotlin apps involving component lifecycles, dependency injection, and multithreading. Kotzilla Platform is built specifically for Kotlin developers and offers automatic, deep insights into component and dependency interactions, thread execution, and early performance signals. This helps you detect and fix issues faster, even before they reach production.
How is Kotzilla Platform different from the Android Studio Debugger?
💡 While Android Studio’s debugger is great for development, it requires manual breakpoint setup and can significantly slow down your app. It struggles with debugging multithreaded interactions, especially in optimized code, and its performance impact makes it unsuitable for production. The Kotzilla Platform, in contrast, automatically tracks execution flow with minimal overhead, even in production environments, allowing you to visualize and debug issues without the slowdown.
What issues can the Kotzilla Platform help me identify?
💡 The Kotzilla Platform helps identify a range of performance issues including startup delays, slow background tasks, main thread bottlenecks, inefficient dependency resolutions, complex dependency graphs, and performance slowdowns caused by individual dependencies, all of which can impact app performance, maintainability, and stability. It also provides insights into crashes across Android, Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) apps, and SDK libraries, in full context of other issues detected.
Can I detect issues directly in my IDE using the Kotzilla Platform?
💡 Yes, the Kotzilla Platform integrates with your IDE through the Koin IDE Plugin, allowing you to detect issues directly within your development environment. It helps visualize Koin configurations, spot issues related to component lifecycles, dependencies, performance, and threading, and allows you to investigate further in the Kotzilla Console for deeper insights.
How can I get started with the Kotzilla Platform
💡 This getting started tutorial will guide you through the steps to configure the Kotzilla SDK and help you identify the first performance issue in your app using the Kotzilla Platform
Is the Kotzilla Platform compatible with KMP apps?
💡 Yes, the Kotzilla Platform is fully compatible with Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) apps. It provides comprehensive insights into component issues, dependencies, and crashes across both Android and iOS devices.
Can I debug my SDK library with the Kotzilla Platform?
💡 Yes. with the Kotzilla Platform you can debug your SDK libraries and white-label apps using Koin isolated contexts to pinpointing problems down to specific lines of code.
What are the dependencies of the Kotzilla SDK libraries? Are any Google libraries required?
💡 Google libraries are not required. The Kotzilla SDK uses only full Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) and Ktor, along with Koin. Koin itself only links the basic Android libraries, such as those related to Activity and Fragment.
Can I enrich the data collected by the Kotzilla SDK?
💡 Yes, the Kotzilla SDK API allows you to add custom messages, trace performance of specific code sections, and add session/user ID properties. For more details, please refer to the official API documentation.
Can I collaborate with my team on debugging my app?
💡 Yes! By upgrading to the Dev Team or Enterprise plan, you and your teammates can collaborate in real-time to debug issues across all your apps and SDK libraries. You can invite team members to investigate and resolve issues together, enhancing collaboration during development. Take a look at the details and team features
What version of Koin should I use?
💡 The Kotzilla SDK is compatible with Koin 3.5+.