Closing the mobile observability gap: how Orange built one of Belgium's most-used apps
There is nothing better than seeing core digital experience metrics align, when engineering dashboards show that systems are green, customer satisfaction is high, and demand is growing.
Whether customers are booking a service, checking an account, or making a payment, they are increasingly doing it on a mobile application. For many organizations, mobile is the primary device where customers expect the most value, in fact, global mobile data traffic continues to grow year over year and is expected to more than double by 2031 (Ericsson Mobility Report, June 2026).
The operational reality of simulating real-world mobile journeys
Mobile user journeys are fast, non-linear and highly fragmented, they are also constrained by smaller screens, network coverage, physical inputs and location. This complexity makes it challenging for site reliability engineers (SREs) to simulate customer experience from a real user perspective. Though SRE teams have well-established practices for server-centric, back-end monitoring, they lack visibility into actual end-user experiences. This is why Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is incredibly effective at closing such gaps, and on mobile journeys it has the most ground to cover.
Many mobile apps are built and tested on stable network connections, like the corporate Wi-Fi, rather than real-world end-user environments. Therefore, closing these blind spots requires measuring the difference of quality first.
To show exactly how to bridge this gap, Xiaofeng Jiang and Christophe Depeux from ITRS sat down with Philippe Roncalli, Senior Manager of Technical Services at Orange Belgium - an ITRS customer of more than 10 years. They discussed how Orange Belgium moved beyond emulators to unlock the real-world performance gains that drove their mobile app to #2 in national app adoption.
Missed the live session? Watch the full discussion on demand here.
The scale of the challenge
As a major subsidiary of the global Orange Group ($46bn in global revenue and 123,000 employees worldwide), Orange Belgium supports 3.6 million mobile customers. They operate a multi-brand strategy, from their core convergent brand to Hey Telecom, a fast-growing digital-only brand built for younger generations.
Managing different brand models at this scale meant they needed a solution that could accurately simulate speed, stability, and real-world performance.
The illusion of green dashboards
For years, the standard methods for mobile testing has relied on desktop emulators or running automated tests over high-speed corporate Wi-Fi. Though it's cost-effective and fast, it can be critically misleading to test this way.
As Philippe pointed out, testing over a simulated network does not replicate a real-world customer standing on a busy street trying to make a purchase on a spotty 5G data connection.
The fragmentation challenge
There are countless device and operating system combinations out there; emulators only mimic a fraction of them. A Wi-Fi-only test environment will never experience the packet loss, cell-tower handoffs or latency of a real mobile network. For younger customers, like those using Hey Telecom, mobile isn't a secondary screen; it is the only screen. When the mobile experience is poor, the business feels it immediately.
How Orange Belgium rebuilt their mobile strategy on real devices
The turning point came from the customer service feedback loop: customers were reporting issues that Wi-Fi-based emulation simply couldn't see. Orange Belgium transformed their testing methodology by working with ITRS to put monitoring on real mobile devices connected to the mobile network.
One of the early steps was deploying the Ekara Pod, an on-premise hardware platform loaded with physical iOS and Android devices in their Brussels office.
This gave them a mobile observability engine grounded in real-world conditions:
1. 24/7 automated real-device monitoring
Orange Belgium runs over 50 automated monitors every 15 minutes, seven days a week, across real physical devices. If a critical user journey breaks very early morning on a Sunday, they know before their customers do.
2. Zero-code, production-grade testing
They test the exact, uninstrumented app packages downloaded straight from the App Store and Google Play, with no instrumentation and no modified builds. What they test is precisely what customers download.
3. Visual diagnostics
If a test fails, with every error log there is a side-by-side timeline of screenshots and full video captures. If an unexpected loading screen prevents a user from clicking a critical button, the product and engineering teams can observe the failure.
4. Pre-release validation on real devices
Beyond 24/7 production monitoring, the same real-device setup acts as a final testing stage before going live. Every new iOS and Android release is validated under real-world conditions before it reaches customers.
The outcomes that drove real business ROI
Moving to real-device monitoring is both a technical upgrade and a driver of business growth. By closing their mobile observability gap, Orange Belgium achieved:
- #2 app adoption in Belgium: by keeping the user experience seamless, the app now sees 2 million users in a rolling 30-day window
- One version of the truth: because the ITRS platform provides clear visual evidence of issues, it connects operations, product owners, designers and business teams, so problems get solved faster.
- Direct revenue protection: critical transactions, such as bill payments and travel data options, are safeguarded by running automated checks every 15 minutes.
To learn more about how Orange Belgium deployed better solutions for mobile observability, watch the full webinar.
Watch the on-demand webinar now