9 Ways to Improve Mobile App Performance: Track Key Performance Metrics

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, mobile apps are an essential part of our daily lives. With millions of apps available, users expect seamless performance, reliability, and responsiveness from their mobile applications. However, poor performance can lead to user frustration, abandonment, and ultimately, a negative impact on your app’s success. In this blog, we will explore the top tips to enhance mobile app performance, ensuring a better user experience and increased app success.

Why is it Important to Monitor App Performance?

Monitoring app performance is crucial for several reasons:

1. Identifying and Resolving Issues: Regular monitoring helps pinpoint and resolve performance issues promptly, preventing user frustration and improving overall app quality.
2. Optimizing User Experience: By optimizing performance, you can enhance the user experience, leading to increased user engagement and retention.
3. Compliance with SLA: Monitoring app performance ensures compliance with service level agreements (SLAs), which are critical for maintaining a positive reputation and avoiding penalties.
4. Tracking Security Issues: Monitoring app performance also helps track security issues, ensuring the protection of user data and preventing potential security breaches.

Top Tips to Improve Mobile App Performance

1. Minimize the Application Size

Mobile devices have limitations in terms of processing power and memory. This is particularly important because most Android market share comprises low-end configuration mobile phones. These devices may not be as powerful as high-end smartphones, and some don’t even support advanced network technologies. Therefore, it becomes essential to ensure that even users with such devices can download and use the application easily.

2. Reduce the App Loading Time

The loading time of your app significantly impacts the user experience. If your app takes too long to load, there is a high likelihood that users will abandon it. Recent reports show that the number of abandoned mobile apps has increased by 6% from 1.76 million to 1.86 million in Q3 2022 due to high loading times.

To optimize your mobile app, you can:

• Monitor and improve resource-intensive setup processes
• Regularly delete outdated cache data to help the app start quickly
• Delay heavy activities until the first screen is rendered
• Load data when opening specific screens instead of at the start of the application
• Prioritize the loading of important elements and utilize placeholders for less critical content
• Using splash screens can create the perception of a fast and responsive app, prevent the app from appearing frozen during longer load times, and maintain brand integrity

3. Improve Client-Server Interaction

Enhancing client-server interaction can significantly boost system performance by reducing latency and improving data transfer efficiency. This leads to faster response times and a more seamless user experience. By optimizing this interaction, you can ensure faster data exchange, reduced latency, smoother communication between the client and server, and increased system productivity.

Here are the key recommendations for achieving optimal app performance through streamlined client-server interaction:

• Optimize the client-server API to enhance app loading speed by minimizing unnecessary data sent to users
• Organize content and objects based on purpose, requesting them only when necessary for improved efficiency
• Test your app’s performance on networks with poor connectivity to ensure seamless usage
• Decrease data load time using a content delivery network (CDN) that shortens the distance between users and data sources
• Increase data delivery time to end-users by minimizing redirects during app launch
• Implement pagination to efficiently handle large data volumes in the news feed, enhancing user experience

4. Optimize Networking

Optimizing networking improves performance, reduces latency, and enhances efficiency in data transmission, leading to faster communication, seamless connectivity, and smoother operations. To optimize networking, try to load textual data first. Image-based content present in your application can then be loaded as the second preference, asynchronously. Avoid duplicate network requests. When poorly implemented, an Android app can send two requests to the server at the same time, leading to increased system congestion and decreased app performance, especially when you have a large user base. Understand and adjust based on connection quality. Your app can change the content quality delivered based on the user’s network conditions to ensure that the app’s usage doesn’t suffer.

5. Optimize Images for High Mobile App Performance

Optimizing images for high mobile app performance reduces the file size, allowing faster loading times and improved user experience. It also helps conserve bandwidth and storage space, leading to efficient app performance and smoother navigation. To optimize images in your application, you can:

• Use vector images
• Serve dynamic image sizes
• Apply color filters as opposed to using different sets of colored images
• Use image caching
• Utilize libraries like Picasso and Fresco

6. Add Online Payment Security

Implementing robust online payment security measures increases user trust and reduces fraudulent activities. With secure payment systems in place, users are more likely to engage with the app, leading to higher user retention and improved overall app performance. To enhance online payment security in your mobile app, follow these steps:

• Ensure secure authentication: Implement robust authentication mechanisms to verify the identity of users during the payment process. Employ two-factor, biometric, or secure token-based authentication to enhance security.
• Adhere to compliance: Ensure your mobile app meets PCI DSS for secure payments. Stay updated on legal requirements like GDPR and local data protection laws to protect user data and comply with regulations.
• Use tokenization: Implement tokenization techniques to replace sensitive payment data with unique tokens. By doing so, even if the tokenized data is intercepted, it holds no value to potential attackers, mitigating the risk of data compromise.
• Establish secure network connections: Utilize secure network protocols, such as HTTPS, to establish encrypted connections between the mobile app and the server. This prevents eavesdropping and data interception, providing additional protection during payment.
• Conduct third-party security audits: Consider engaging a reputable security firm to conduct regular audits and penetration testing of your mobile app. These assessments help identify potential security weaknesses or vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit, allowing you to address them proactively.

By implementing these measures, you can significantly bolster the online payment security of your mobile app, providing users with a safe and trustworthy payment experience.

7. Cache Data to Optimize for Offline Mode

Caching data to optimize offline mode enables the app to store and retrieve previously accessed information locally, allowing users to access content and functionality without an internet connection. This enhances the app’s usability, improves performance, and provides a seamless experience for users regardless of their online connectivity. When your network is weak, display whatever data you have while fetching required data. Doing so will:

• Reduce your server load
• Reduce the number of your mobile phone’s radio usage, improving your app’s battery life

If you don’t have a testing team at your disposal, try switching your phone into airplane mode and test your app for offline performance.

8. Optimizing Screen Size for High Mobile App Performance

Optimizing screen size for high mobile app performance is crucial because it allows developers to design and display content effectively, ensuring smooth user interactions and minimizing resource consumption. By tailoring the app’s layout and functionalities to fit different screen sizes, users can have an optimal experience across various devices, enhancing performance and usability. As a rule of thumb:

• Build for small and medium screens
• Optimize for MDPI and HDPI
• Implement adaptive UI flows

Don’t have access to a wide range of devices to test screen size and resolution? Test with emulator configurations.

9. Optimize Your App Launch

In 2023, the mobile app industry is thriving, with over 6.3 billion smartphone users worldwide. With increasing mobile app users, ensuring a quick app launch is vital for a seamless user experience. To optimize your mobile app performance (iOS), you should consider the following for decreasing launch time:

• Embed fewer dylibs
• Consolidate Objective-C classes
• Eliminate static initializers
• Use more Swift, as recommended by Apple
• Measure your efforts using DYLD_PRINT_STATISTICS
• Discourage the usage of dlopen

On Android, the following usually impacts the app launch time:

• Instantiation of many views
• Expensive content like decoding bitmaps
• Running layouts

To make your app launch faster on Android:

• Don’t inflate parts of the UI that you don’t require on the first launch. Use placeholders for hierarchies that can be optionally inflated later
• Avoid memory churns due to allocation and garbage collections whenever possible
• Use tools like Apteligent to monitor and optimize your app launch time
• Avoid initialization code in your app’s object

Key Application Performance Metrics

Here are some of the most important application performance metrics you should be tracking:

1. User Satisfaction / Apdex Scores

The application performance index, or Apdex score, has become an industry standard for tracking the relative performance of an application. It works by specifying a goal for how long a specific web request or transaction should take. Those transactions are then bucketed into satisfied (fast), tolerating (sluggish), too slow, and failed requests. A simple math formula is then applied to provide a score from 0 to 1. Developers Need Smart Application Metrics, Not Server Monitoring Retrace automatically tracks satisfaction scores for every one of your applications and web requests. We convert the number to a 0-100 instead of 0-1 representation to make it easier to understand. Web Application Performance Metrics for Satisfaction Retrace Satisfaction Chart

2. Average Response Time

Averages are still a useful application performance metric, providing insight into the overall performance of your application.

3. Error Rates

Monitoring error rates is a critical application performance metric, ensuring that errors are minimized and user experience is improved.

4. Count of Application Instances

Tracking the number of server/application instances is important for scaling and ensuring that your application meets demand.

5. Request Rate

Understanding how much traffic your application receives is crucial for ensuring that your application can handle the load.

6. Application & Server CPU

Monitoring CPU usage is a basic and critical metric, ensuring that your server and applications are running efficiently.

7. Application Availability

Monitoring and measuring if your application is online and available is a key metric, ensuring compliance with SLAs and maintaining a positive reputation.

8. Garbage Collection

Garbage collection metrics are important for identifying performance problems that can arise from it, ensuring that your application runs efficiently.

9. Memory Usage

Monitoring memory usage is crucial for identifying and resolving memory-related performance issues, ensuring that your application runs smoothly.

Conclusion

Improving mobile app performance is crucial for ensuring a better user experience, increased user retention, and overall app success. By following these top tips and monitoring key application performance metrics, you can optimize your mobile app performance, ensuring a seamless and enjoyable experience for your users.