How the Grab Early Access app helps stress-test new features

Alex Prokofiev, Software Engineering Manager, Mobile

. February 26, 2025 . Regional

At Grab, our goal is to give our users the best experience. One practice we employ is known as “dogfooding.” It means letting company employees use products before their official release, allowing teams to gain direct, first-hand experience of our products’ strengths and weaknesses.

Many tech companies use dogfooding to guarantee product excellence. Grab employees have their own special version of the Grab app that includes new and experimental features not yet available to the public, the Grab Early Access (GEA) app. It’s currently accessible exclusively to Grab’s ~10,000 employees (Grabbers) spread across Southeast Asia, and it helps us quickly test and try out new features at scale.

The GEA app, together with comprehensive trials, user testing and research, ensures that new products are extensively stress-tested and de-bugged before their full release.

Solving issues

Grabbers use GEA just like any user would use the regular Grab app, but they’re encouraged to test for problems and give feedback. We’ve made it as easy as possible to do so. By simply shaking their phones, Grabbers can report an issue or suggest an improvement via the app.

When an issue is reported, the last few seconds of in-app activity will be sent to the backend. We then use Large Language Models to analyse the user session, and get a detailed description of when the issue occurred and other relevant information such as the impact on user experience and possible causes.

This minimises the effort required to file a report, and reduces the time engineers need to spend evaluating tickets.

The GEA version of the app also tracks user interactions to identify the last viewed screen when an issue is reported. Each screen within the app has a designated owner, like a product manager or an engineering team. The system then automatically assigns the issue to the right person or team, making sure it gets fixed quickly and efficiently.

To make it even easier for Grabbers also have the option to report issues via a voice note or use the speech-to-text feature, instead of manually entering a description.

Improving user experience

The ongoing feedback loop via GEA is part of efforts to ensure that we are constantly making the experience on the Grab app better for our users.

For example, when the Family Account feature was released on GEA in November 2023, it was quickly improved before its full release in January 2024, based on feedback from Grabbers that the user interface was confusing. This valid and valuable feedback prompted us to make it easier to navigate and manage members in the Family Account.

We also rely on Grabbers on GEA to report minor bugs. For instance, a Grabber who was in Thailand reported that her app wasn’t displaying the correct local time, which could result in confusion about delivery and ride times. The engineers on the backend were able to quickly rectify this upon receiving the feedback.

The GEA app exemplifies our commitment to continuous improvement. By getting real, on-ground feedback from Grabbers, we are always refining our products and enhancing the app experience for all our users.

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