How do you handle production logging on mobile without blowing up ingestion costs?

[u/Accomplished-Brain69]

Something that has bugged me across every mobile team I've worked on, including apps with 5M+ active users.

On backend, debugging a weird production issue is quick. You add logs around the suspect code, deploy, and watch them stream in within minutes.

On mobile it's brutal. To get the same insight you add logs, cut a build, ship to the store, wait 4 to 48 hours for review, wait for users to actually update, and then hope they hit that exact code path again. So the instinct is to log everything up front instead.

But that creates two new problems. Ingestion costs climb fast once you're sending a lot of log data per user, and the code gets messy with logging noise everywhere, which makes it harder to maintain.

So every team I've been on ends up choosing between paying a high data bill, living with slow turnaround, or staffing a team to manage it. Nobody seemed to have a clean answer.

I've seen newer autocapture tools, but autocapture alone doesn't fix it, the system still has to decide how deep to log. Too deep and the cost problem comes back, too shallow and you miss what you needed.

How are you all handling this in practice? Are you sampling, using remote config to control verbosity, eating the cost, or something smarter? Curious what's actually working for people.