How to Improve Your Mobile App’s Performance
You don’t have to completely rebuild your business’s mobile app to improve app performance.
Unfortunately, many people think that’s the case. While improving performance does take some effort, you don’t have to tear your app down to the studs.
Given the increasing reliance on mobile applications, their performance significantly impacts the user experience. Users are less and less tolerant of errors, delays, and crashes, and quick to jump to other apps that perform better.
At Taazaa, we use a few different mobile app optimization techniques to significantly increase app responsiveness.
Let’s look at a few ways to improve the performance of your mobile app.
KPIs for Mobile Application Performance
When assessing the effectiveness of a mobile app, it’s crucial to analyze various performance metrics.
App Load Time: This KPI is the time it takes for the app to launch and be ready for user interaction after the user initiates its opening. Quick load times contribute to a positive user experience and are often the user’s first impression of the app.
Responsiveness: Responsiveness is how quickly the app responds to user inputs or actions. It includes the speed at which the app can process user commands, load content, and provide feedback to user interactions.
Battery Usage: An efficient app performs its tasks using minimal battery power. High battery consumption can lead to negative user experiences and may cause users to uninstall the app.
Network Usage: Network usage refers to how effectively the app uses network resources. An optimized app should function well even under poor network conditions and consume minimal data.
Crashes and Errors: The number and frequency of app crash or errors is another crucial performance indicator. A high crash rate disrupts the user experience and erodes user trust in the app.
Frame Rate: The frame rate is particularly relevant for graphic-intensive apps like games. It measures how smoothly the visual content is rendered on the screen. A higher frame rate indicates a smoother visual experience.
Factors Affecting Mobile Application Performance
Device Compatibility
The performance of a mobile app can significantly vary across different devices due to variations in hardware specifications, operating systems, screen resolutions, and other factors. An app may work perfectly on one device but exhibit performance issues on another. Hence, ensuring device compatibility is crucial for maintaining consistent app performance.
Network Conditions
Network conditions, such as internet connection quality, can significantly influence app performance, particularly for apps that rely heavily on internet connectivity. An optimized app should be able to handle poor network conditions gracefully and still provide functionality to the user.
Code Efficiency
The efficiency of the underlying code is a crucial factor in an app’s performance. Unoptimized or redundant code can lead to slow execution, excessive memory usage, and other performance issues. Regular code reviews and refactoring can help maintain code efficiency.
UI/UX Elements
The design and implementation of the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) elements can also impact app performance. Complex animations, high-resolution images, and other resource-intensive UI elements can slow down the app. Moreover, a poorly designed user experience can make the app seem slower than it actually is.
Use of APIs and External Services
Many apps rely on APIs and external services for functionality, such as fetching data from a server. The performance of these external services can directly impact the app’s performance. Therefore, efficient usage and handling of these services are essential for optimal app performance.
How to Measure Mobile Application Performance
Built-In Android and iOS Tools
Android and iOS platforms provide built-in tools for monitoring and evaluating app performance.
Android Profiler: Integrated into Android Studio, this tool provides real-time data about your app’s CPU, memory, and network activities. It can help developers identify performance bottlenecks and issues such as memory leaks or excessive CPU usage.
Xcode Instruments: For iOS apps, Apple provides a suite of performance tools known as Instruments within Xcode. These tools help monitor memory usage, CPU load, resource leaks, and network activity.
Third-Party Mobile App Performance Testing Tools
Besides platform-specific tools, several third-party tools are available that can help developers assess the performance of their apps across multiple platforms and conditions.
AppDynamics: This tool provides insights into the app’s performance, user experiences, and business impact. It also allows for tracking real-time performance metrics.
New Relic: New Relic offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities, including mobile app performance monitoring. It helps understand the relationships between the app’s performance and customer experience.
Apptim: Apptim allows developers to test their app’s performance locally on their devices, identifying critical performance and stability issues before releasing it to the app store.
Strategies to Improve App Performance
Optimize Your Code
Code optimization plays a vital role in enhancing the performance of your app. Here are a few mobile app optimization techniques:
Minimizing Resource Usage: Optimize the code to ensure it uses minimal CPU and memory resources. Avoid redundant operations and unnecessary computations. Use background threads for long-running operations to avoid blocking the main thread and ensure the app remains responsive.
Efficient Data Structures and Algorithms: Choosing the right data structures and algorithms can significantly impact performance. Evaluate your choice based on the specific use case and the data size you’re working with.
Regular Code Refactoring: Regularly review and refactor your code to keep it clean, efficient, and easy to maintain. Remove obsolete code and unnecessary dependencies.
Improve Network Performance
Many apps heavily rely on network connectivity, making network performance crucial.
Data Compression: Use compression techniques to reduce the size of data transmitted over the network, making your app faster and more responsive.
Optimized API Usage: Design APIs efficiently and only request required data. Batch requests where possible and use efficient query parameters.
Handling Poor Network Conditions: Design your app to handle poor network conditions gracefully. Include features such as offline mode or data caching.
Optimize UI/UX
The user interface and user experience significantly impact the perceived performance of your app.
Lazy Loading: Implement lazy loading for content, which means loading and displaying only what is necessary for the user and loading the rest as needed.
Simplified Design: A simple, clean design can enhance app performance. Avoid complex animations and high-resolution images that can slow down your app.
User Feedback Integration: Listen to your users. Their feedback can provide valuable insights into performance issues that you might have overlooked.
Test Across Different Devices and Network Conditions
Testing your app in diverse scenarios ensures consistent performance.
Importance of Diverse Device Testing: Test your app on various devices with different hardware specifications, screen sizes, and OS versions to ensure compatibility.
Simulating Different Network Conditions: Test your app under various network conditions, including low-quality network connections, to ensure it performs well even under less-than-ideal circumstances.
Efficient Use of APIs and External Services
The performance of APIs and external services directly impacts your app’s performance.
Caching: Implement caching strategies to store data locally, reducing the need for network requests and thus improving speed and responsiveness.
Updating APIs and SDKs: Ensure you are using the latest versions of APIs and SDKs, which often come with performance improvements and bug fixes.
Memory Management
Efficient memory management contributes significantly to app performance.
Identifying and Fixing Memory Leaks: Memory leaks can slow down your app and eventually cause it to crash. Use memory profiling tools to identify and fix these leaks.
Efficient Memory Usage: Be mindful of your app’s memory usage. Release memory resources as soon as you’re done using them. Avoid loading extensive data sets into memory all at once.
Mobile App Performance Testing
Mobile application performance testing helps identify performance bottlenecks, validate the app’s responsiveness, stability, and speed, and ensures that the app can handle peak loads efficiently. There are several types of performance testing that each serve a specific purpose.
Load Testing: Load testing is done to understand the app’s behavior under a specific expected load. It helps identify the app’s capacity and determines how it performs when multiple users access it simultaneously.
Stress Testing: Stress testing involves testing the app under extreme workloads to see how it handles high traffic or data processing. It can help identify the app’s breaking point or any issues that could arise under strenuous conditions.
Usability Testing: Usability testing focuses on the user’s experience with the app. It assesses the app’s ease of use, navigation, and overall user interaction. Poor usability can make an app seem less performant, even if it’s technically efficient.
Endurance Testing: This type of testing checks the app’s performance under a continuously expected workload. It helps to identify how the system behaves under sustained use and whether any issues, such as memory leaks, emerge over time.
Testing Tools
Selecting the right tools for mobile app performance testing is essential. The choice of tool depends on the type of app (Android, iOS, or cross-platform), the type of testing required, and the project’s specific needs.
Apache JMeter: JMeter is a popular open-source load and performance testing tool. It can simulate multiple users with concurrent threads and create a heavy load against a network or web service.
LoadRunner: LoadRunner is a widely used mobile application performance testing tool that can simulate thousands of users concurrently. It supports various types of software and offers numerous monitoring and analysis features.
Firebase Test Lab: Provided by Google, Firebase Test Lab allows testing on a wide range of devices hosted in Google’s data centers. It can automate the testing process and provide detailed reports about the tests.
Xcode Test Flight: This is specifically for iOS apps. TestFlight lets developers distribute and test their iOS apps before launching them on the App Store.
Speed Isn’t Everything
Mobile app performance is not just about the app’s speed; it’s about delivering a seamless, engaging user experience.
It takes time and effort to improve app performance. As your app grows and evolves, mobile application performance testing should be done regularly.
Regularly check your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), listen to user feedback, and keep up-to-date with the latest mobile app optimization techniques and tools. Engage mobile app development services if you don’t have the bandwidth to do it yourself. Remember, a high-performing app translates into a successful app.
