Provide tech support
Bit of a meta question to programming - for people who have iOS apps/games out there, how do you provide tech support for your customers? Any stories/incidents to share?
17 comments · 92% upvoted · other discussions
comments
super_natural_bc
[deleted]
Telemetry and logging.
LifeIsGood008 [OP]
Telemetry as in https://developer.apple.com/icloud/telemetry/?
[deleted]
Yeah you can use that or anything else there’s tons of options. If you have a semi serious app you could use something like instabug also
LifeIsGood008 [OP]
I see. Wouldn't this be more of a metric/performance monitoring thing than customer/technical support? Like it doesn't provide a way for customer to reach out to you about issues
outdoorsgeek
I think in this case they mean more general purpose analytics and not something specific to CloudKit.
RecordingOk3922
I provide a support email address, but also a link to a discord channel (which I mark as the preferred support method).
Then on the discord channel I have a support bot that helps users create tickets, the free tier it offers is enough so far. It’s been really helpful, but I’m not sure it’d work for every app; in my niche, users are quite technical.
LifeIsGood008 [OP]
Good workflow. Do you offer tiered support for non-subscribers vs subscribers? Any moderation issues with bots and scammers?
RecordingOk3922
I charge ~$4.99 for the app, it’s not subscription. Charging for the app may help reduce support issues. What’s really neat is when other users respond to each other’s issues within discord; I didn’t anticipate starting a community.
No issues with bots or scammers, thankfully.
Not related to this thread, but I feel like it’s valuable if you’re interested in creating a discord server: I made a channel for reporting translation errors within the app. This was necessary because I used an LLM to translate my app into ~ 42 languages. So far the LLM has been shockingly accurate (according to a German user that helped fix some strings)
joeystarr73
I have a support screen. User is able to enter a message, email and on submit i send logs to my slack channel. Very useful.
LifeIsGood008 [OP]
Neat. Do you use an existing integration for this or did you build the pipeline yourself?
joeystarr73
Built it myself
I have an Android/iOS app, and provide support by email. Occasionally by phone, but only as a follow-up to emails. There is also a "Report a Bug" feature in the app where the user can directly send a message and it will automatically include log files from the device. Log files can be a life saver for tech support because users are not very good at explaining in detail what happened. Rolling log files are best so that they cannot grow to uncapped sizes on the user's device.
LifeIsGood008 [OP] 1 points · May 2025 · SwiftUI
Good tip on rolling log files. Do you use a 3p service for the "send a message" feature? I see there's a couple that charge upwards of hundreds of $ a month
super_natural_bc 2 points · May 2025
Not sure what 3p is. The way I do it is coded directly into the app by sending an HTTP POST to my server with multi-part file request (just like uploading a photo to a website). I also zip the files on the client side first to minimize upload time. Text files typically compress 10x.
LifeIsGood008 [OP] 1 points · May 2025 · SwiftUI
3p = third party. Always had a habit of referring it by its acronym haha
super_natural_bc 1 points · May 2025
Of course, that makes sense. I was thinking PPP - what's that? haha
LifeIsGood008 [OP] 2 points · May 2025 · SwiftUI
ikr acronyms can quickly get out of hand. always hated them but i guess people live long enough to become the villain