Monitoring Mobile App Performance: Strategies For Success

Mobile Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools are essential for optimizing mobile applications and improving user experience. With numerous apps available, users have little tolerance for poor performance, including bugs, crashes, slow speeds, and high battery consumption. To meet user expectations and prevent uninstalls, developers must continuously monitor and improve app performance. APM tools provide valuable insights into key metrics, such as crashes, errors, network requests, and UI hangs, enabling proactive issue identification and resolution. This comprehensive approach ensures apps run efficiently and meet user expectations, enhancing customer engagement and retention.

Monitor mobile app crashes

Monitoring mobile app crashes is essential to ensure a good user experience and prevent negative impacts on revenue. Here are some strategies to monitor and address mobile app crashes:

Proactive Monitoring

• Use a Mobile Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tool: APM tools like Instabug allow you to monitor various metrics such as app crashes, errors, network requests, UI hangs, and more. This helps you take a proactive approach to improving app quality and performance.
• Understand User Experience: It is crucial to comprehend the mobile user experience, including their interactions with the app, performance expectations, and how these connect to your full technology stack.
• Monitor Full-Stack Infrastructure: Understand the availability of your full-stack infrastructure to gain a comprehensive view of your application's performance. This includes monitoring both the application layer and the underlying infrastructure.
• Set Alert Thresholds: Define thresholds for performance alerts to catch crashes, errors, and availability issues early on. This enables you to take prompt action before these issues significantly affect users.
• Distributed Tracing: Utilize distributed tracing to follow requests through the application cycle and pinpoint areas of slowdown. This helps in troubleshooting and optimizing the application's performance.

Reactive Measures

• Instantly Address Crashes: When crashes occur, respond promptly to fix the issues and improve user experience.
• Analyze Crash Analytics: Utilize AI-powered root cause analysis to understand why mobile apps are crashing. This helps in making informed decisions to enhance user satisfaction and prevent negative app store ratings.
• Understand Business Impact: Evaluate the impact of crashes on strategic business KPIs, such as revenue, conversions, and feature adoption across different app versions. This information guides your prioritization and decision-making.
• Monitor Mobile Experience: Regularly test your app as an ordinary user, simulating various usage conditions (different OS, OS versions, screen resolutions, network quality, etc.). This helps identify and resolve problems quickly and optimize the user experience.
• Crash Resolution Procedure: Implement a well-defined crash resolution procedure that can be rapidly executed when an abnormal increase in crashes is detected.

Understand user experience

Understanding user experience is critical to delivering a great digital experience and driving customer engagement and retention. Monitoring mobile app performance allows you to gain valuable insights into how your users interact with your app, helping you identify areas for improvement and optimize their experience.

Factors Affecting User Experience

Several factors can impact a user's experience with a mobile app, including:

• App performance: This includes speed, battery consumption, and stability. Users expect apps to be responsive and fast, with a low impact on their device's battery life.
• Bugs and crashes: App crashes and bugs can be frustrating for users and may lead to negative reviews and uninstalls.
• User interface (UI) hangs: A UI hang occurs when the app fails to respond to user interactions in a timely manner, creating a frustrating experience.
• App launch time: The time it takes for an app to become responsive after being clicked plays a crucial role in shaping users' first impressions.
• Network performance: Tracking response times and network errors as experienced by users is essential for ensuring a smooth and reliable connection.

Tools for Understanding User Experience

Several tools are available to help you understand and improve user experience:

• Instabug Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Helps track key metrics such as Apdex scores, UI hangs, network timeouts, slow launches, and custom traces. It offers a single metric to align your team around your app's quality and proactively identifies issues affecting your users.
• Raygun: Provides a unique view of how users experience your software applications, focusing on errors, crashes, and performance issues. It includes features like smart error grouping and page performance breakdowns to help diagnose and resolve issues efficiently.
• New Relic: A widely used tool that offers User Interaction Traces, providing code-level data traces and visual timelines to understand memory usage, database activity, and CPU utilization.
• Dynatrace: An "all-in-one" solution for monitoring infrastructure, apps, and user behavior. It provides crash analytics, detailed HTTP session analysis, and end-to-end full-stack request tracing.
• Firebase Performance Monitor: A free, easy-to-use, cross-platform tool that automatically collects network metrics, including response codes, payload size, and duration times for automated traces.
• Cloudflare Mobile SDK: A simple and free network monitor tool that offers detailed analysis of your app's network performance, providing insights into potential issues.

Track app performance

Tracking and monitoring your app's performance is critical to delivering a great digital experience and driving customer engagement and retention. Here are some ways to track and improve your app's performance:

Understand User Experience

It is essential to comprehend how users interact with your app and their overall experience. This includes monitoring metrics such as app speed, battery consumption, launch time, and how long it takes for requests to execute. Users have low tolerance for poor performance, and a negative experience can lead to uninstalls and lower opinions of your company.

Utilize Performance Monitoring Tools

Use Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools like Instabug, Raygun, or New Relic to gain insights into your app's performance. These tools help identify issues like crashes, errors, network requests, UI hangs, slow launches, and more. APM tools provide a proactive approach to improving app quality and allow you to allocate resources efficiently.

Monitor Mobile Application Performance

Focus on mobile-specific performance monitoring to understand how your app behaves on mobile devices. Tools like Dynatrace offer mobile application monitoring, providing end-to-end visibility, detailed mobile analytics, and insights into user experiences. This helps address mobile-specific issues like app crashes, backend services, and user interactions such as touches, taps, or swipes.

Analyze Network Performance

Given that a significant proportion of app performance issues are related to the network, it's crucial to use monitoring tools that give adequate attention to network performance. Tools like New Relic, Dynatrace, and Cloudflare's Mobile SDK offer insights into network-related metrics, helping you optimize your app's performance in this area.

Continuously Improve

Treat app improvement as an ongoing process. Regularly monitor and test your app to identify areas that need enhancement. Stay proactive in addressing performance issues and bottlenecks to ensure your app delivers a seamless and satisfying user experience.

Fix performance issues

Performance issues in mobile apps can stem from various factors, and addressing them is crucial to ensure a seamless user experience. Here are some strategies to fix common performance problems:

• Outdated App Versions: Keep your app updated to the latest OS versions, such as Android Oreo or Nougat for Android and iOS 11 or 10 for iOS. Regular updates ensure compatibility with newer operating systems, enhance performance, and provide the latest security patches.
• Slow Server Speed: Identify the interactions between application components through Application Dependency Mapping (ADM). Reduce the server load by employing a reverse proxy server or deploying a load balancer to distribute traffic evenly.
• Unoptimized Encrypted Connections: Optimize SSL/TLS connections by adopting HTTP/2 or SPDY, which reduce connection overhead by requiring only a single handshake per session.
• Chatty Conversations: Minimize the number of requests between systems and check for delays between requests. Virtualization can help develop a virtual version of the device or resource, improving efficiency.
• Faulty Libraries and SDKs: Review the code of third-party libraries for errors or bugs. Ensure you're using secure, stable, and reliable libraries with a large community. Examples of libraries to monitor include Picasso, Glide, Eventbus, and Retrofit.
• Overcrowded Data: Compress data to reduce the size of images, videos, graphics, or audio content. This speeds up loading times without compromising features. Consider lossless compression to restore files to their original size, or lossy compression to remove data unnoticeably from the app.
• Slow Network Speed: Continuously monitor network speed to identify when the app slows down. Ensure your application queries the correct primary DNS server to prevent delays.
• Device Compatibility: Test your app on a range of devices, especially older models, to ensure compatibility and performance. Devices with less RAM or weaker processors may experience poor performance, impacting the user interface and data display.
• Networking Issues: Avoid frequent server data requests and implement proper data caching strategies. Execute data-generating operations asynchronously without blocking the main thread responsible for rendering the UI.
• Image Optimization: Resize and compress images to minimize load times. Compression reduces the number of bytes without lowering the resolution, while resizing spares bandwidth usage.
• Offline Functionality: Ensure your app functions well offline or with a poor internet connection, unless it's specified otherwise in the documentation.
• API Performance: Measure API latency and target a one-second response time to enhance speed.
• App Crashes: Monitor and minimize app crashes to provide a smooth user experience. Understand user actions, the impact on different users, and prioritize fixing the most critical crashes.
• Database Performance: Unify research under one product when multiple databases are involved. Use database tuning techniques to optimize the database environment for easier data organization and access.
• User Sessions: Encourage longer user sessions by sending contextual push notifications, offering attractive deals, and creating a sense of urgency.

Remember, mobile users have little tolerance for poor performance, so proactively addressing these issues is essential for retaining users and fostering a positive app experience.

Measure user experience

Measuring user experience is key to a successful app. A negative user experience can cost a lot of money and damage a company's reputation. Therefore, app improvement should be a continuous process that includes monitoring and testing.

There are several tools available to help monitor mobile app performance and user experience. These include:

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an "all-in-one" solution for monitoring infrastructure, apps, and user behavior. It offers end-to-end visibility, detailed mobile analytics, and insights into user experiences. It provides crash analytics, detailed HTTP session analysis, and end-to-end full-stack request tracing. Dynatrace is not as intuitive or easy to use as some other tools, and it is expensive, but the pricing is more suitable for small companies as it is proportional to the number of users.

New Relic

New Relic is a comprehensive solution, allowing you to gather a lot of different data to improve decision-making. It is cross-platform and easy to add to any mobile app, providing full-stack visibility. New Relic creates intuitive and comprehensive reports, including geographic performance reporting. It also focuses on troubleshooting and error detection. However, it is priced at $999/month/app, which may be too high for smaller companies.

Firebase Performance Monitor

A free, easy-to-use, cross-platform performance measurement tool from Firebase. It automatically collects multiple performance metrics, including app startup time and HTTP/S network requests, and provides network failure reporting. However, the report is not as comprehensive as some other paid solutions, and it does not offer end-to-end request tracing.

Cloudflare Mobile SDK

A free and simple network monitor tool from Cloudflare, a well-known CDN with a focus on security protection and performance improvement. While it does not offer the same level of features as paid solutions, it is a good starting point for gaining insights into your app's network performance.

Raygun

Raygun gives your development team a unique view of how users are experiencing your software applications. It focuses on errors, crashes, and performance issues, with a feature that collects errors under a single root cause to avoid flooding you with notifications. Raygun also offers page performance breakdowns for every user session, deployment tracking, and high-level analytics, including location-based loading times.

Instabug

Instabug's APM tool is designed specifically for mobile teams. It helps you track key metrics such as Apdex scores, UI hangs, network timeouts, slow launches, and custom traces. It enables you to align around a single metric representing your app's quality and proactively discover issues affecting your users.

By utilizing these tools and continuously monitoring and improving your app, you can ensure a positive user experience and drive customer engagement and retention.

Frequently asked questions