As mobile users, we have all faced this annoyance at some point: installing a completely new app only to be greeted by a frozen screen. Moreover, the app loading took more than a minute; it has such high-power consumption, which is almost like the app is sucking out of a firehose. This is not just an inconvenience; it also causes your customer considerable trouble.
Users today expect apps to be fast, reliable, and efficient, and they won’t hesitate to switch to a competitor if an app falls short of their expectations.
Research from Google indicates that approximately 53% of mobile app users would abandon an app if its screen loading time exceeded three seconds. This means losing over half of your potential users in just three seconds.
No wonder tracking mobile app metrics is no longer viewed as a luxury; it has become a necessity. Real-world performance data is a prerequisite for understanding, optimizing, and delivering superior user experience for all kinds of applications, whether games, fintech platforms, or social media apps.
What mobile app metrics should you track, and how can you improve performance proactively before issues arise? In this blog, we will analyze these questions.
The Cost of Poor Mobile App Performance
An app that is slow and unresponsive would not only leave users unsatisfied but also lead to a decrease in the business revenue. It is essential to identify performance issues promptly, as ignoring them can lead to negative reviews, abandoned purchases, and costly interventions in the future.
1. Users Expect Lightning-Fast Apps
When you click “Confirm” on a travel app to book a flight for your next vacation, the screen freezes. You are left with several questions:
- Was my booking successful?
- Will I be billed twice if I attempt to make a payment again?
- Is this mobile app trustable?
An app’s real-time performance monitoring is no longer just good practice; it has become a necessity. Before the apps are released to end users, problems such as sluggish API response times, frame dropouts, or excessive memory utilization must be identified and addressed.
The quicker bottlenecks are identified and resolved, the better the user’s experience. Many frustrating situations can be avoided by testing teams, who should ensure they dedicate time to client-side performance testing at the early stage of development, so users will not encounter any slowness.
Read More: Monitoring Performance Metrics
3. A Bug in Development is 100x Cheaper Than in Production
Resolving performance issues during app launches is far more cost-effective than addressing them after users complain. A mobile app for a smart home product company caused excessive battery drain, even when running in the background.
Users experienced severe battery drain, which also affected the use of other apps. Due to negative reviews and ratings, widespread frustration and dissatisfaction led many users to uninstall the app, resulting in a decrease in engagement.
The company had to allocate several weeks and a portion of its development budget to resolve the issues. If they had carried out real-time monitoring and tested the performance of apps across various devices and networks using platforms such as Pcloudy, the crash could have been entirely prevented before launch.
Why Client-Side Performance Testing is as Important as Server-Side Testing
Server-side performance testing, which focuses on how well web, application, and database servers respond to user requests, is what comes to mind when we think about performance testing.
However, client-side performance testing is equally important because users experience it directly while using the app. Server-side speed on Web, APIs, and database operations makes them respond fast, while the performance of the client makes sure that:
- The user interface is responsive and fluid.
- Gestures and touchscreen movements function flawlessly.
- The application doesn’t lag, crash, or consume excessive memory.
- Battery usage is optimized for maximum performance.
- The application works well on various screens, OS, and devices.
Even with a lightning-fast backend, users will still find the app annoying if the user interface is slow. Recently, users of a popular mobile game reported issues with inconsistent frame rates and performance, particularly on specific Android devices.
Server connectivity problems and other issues within the app may have contributed to a higher number of negative reviews, resulting in a reduced score of 1.8 out of 5 stars on the Google Play Store.
Platforms like Pcloudy enable testers to evaluate app performance on real devices, tracking real-time metrics such as frame rate, battery drain, and UI responsiveness.
The Key Differences Between Client-Side and Server-Side Performance Testing
The 6 Essential Mobile App Metrics You Should Track
Now that we’ve discussed why performance tracking is crucial, what mobile app metrics should you monitor? More than 60 performance metrics can be captured by Pcloudy; however, this blog will focus on the six most critical app performance metrics.
1. App Load Time – The Time It Takes to Open the App
Consider a bank customer viewing their savings balance in a digital bank account on a mobile banking app; they are frustrated when it takes a few minutes to display the balance. The slowness would likely be a trigger for customers to seek quicker alternatives.
A study from Google highlights that the likelihood of a mobile visitor abandoning the site increases by 123% as the loading time increases from 1 second to 10 seconds, underscoring the critical importance of fast-loading apps and websites.
Read More: What is Application Performance Monitoring?
2️. Crash Rate & Error Logs – The App Crash Frequency
The user experience is directly affected by a mobile application that experiences constant crashes, resulting in a decline in in-app ratings and, consequently, poor reviews often associated with such declining ratings.
Logging the error code and a detailed error description, even if the app crashes, is significant, as it allows developers to identify the accurate problems the app is facing and, hence, quickly resolve them.
A few years ago, an alert application developed for Southern Australia was unable to alert users about emergencies due to technical glitches. This led to many users complaining about the app’s quality and questioning its purpose.
3. Battery & Resource Consumption – Ensuring Efficient Power and Memory Usage
A mobile app that drains battery power and consumes a significant amount of your device’s memory can prevent users from using their mobile devices altogether due to battery exhaustion. You may have heard that many Facebook app users complain about a significant power drain, even when the app is running in the background.
Users may sometimes uninstall the application due to excessive battery depletion, allowing them to conserve battery power. Developers can utilize power depletion statistics to optimize an application’s functionalities by optimizing processor-intensive tasks and reducing memory consumption.
4. Network & API Performance – Reducing Latency and Improving Response Times
When mobile applications face difficulties such as poor connectivity or prolonged response times from API calls, they are likely to become completely unresponsive.
Take, for example, many digital banking applications that we see today are not capable of processing transactions during business hours under peak workload. The response time of mobile apps can be improved by using the correct configuration of network requests and by the right usage of API calls.
5️. UI & Frame Rate Performance – Smoother Animations and Touch Response
Poor animations and unresponsive touch controls can create a lack of usability in an app. A mobile game is smooth because it runs at 60 FPS, and touch interactions are responsive.
If performance drops below 30 frames per second (FPS), users may experience lag and feel frustrated. Therefore, performance-related problems should be identified and addressed using tools at an early stage, which will make the app more performance-optimized.
6. App Stability Under Load – How Well the App Handles High Traffic
This mobile app metric measures the capacity to manage high user load, particularly during peak times. Often, government, e-commerce, and banking applications experience significant outages when visitor numbers surge. During the 2024 holiday season, the mobile apps and websites of a leading UK health and beauty retailer experienced outages due to high traffic, which took hours to recover.
Each metric mentioned earlier is imperative to the app’s smooth functioning. These metrics help ensure users get a fast, soft, and frustration-free experience. Pcloudy comes with a bundle of more than 60 mobile app performance metrics, which are very effective in improving overall app quality.
Final Thoughts on Mobile App Metrics and Performance
A slow, buggy, or power-hungry app is one that users are less likely to use. If the app takes a long time to load, drains the battery quickly, or crashes too often, users are likely to remove it and switch to a competitor app.
Pcloudy offers testing of real devices, functional experience testing, performance monitoring, and automation capabilities. Testers can now track key metrics of mobile applications, including load time, crash rate, battery usage, and API performance, using the platform.
With the help of the platform, testers can identify performance-related issues early on, and the end user is provided with a smooth, dependable, and seamless app experience.
