Mobile apps that win

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Mobile Apps that Win
Achieving High Performance with Real-time Analytics
Steve Fox Foglight Mobile APM Product Manager

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Response Times: 3 Important Limits
• 100 ms – Limit user will feel as instantaneously
• 1.0 sec – Limit to not interrupt user flow of thought
• 10 sec – Limit of keeping the user’s attention on the task
• “Usability Engineering”, Jakob Nielsen, 1993
• http://www.nngroup.com/articles/response-times-3-important-limits/
Application Performance Monitoring

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Web Response Times Studies
• Google: +500 ms page load time = 25% fewer searches
• Amazon: +100 ms of page load time = 1% lost sales
• Facebook: +500 ms of page load time = 3% less traffic

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Walmart Conversion Rate Analysis
• Multiple Retailer Experiment:
• 1 second delay = 7% drop in conversion
Source: http://minus.com/msM8y8nyh#2e

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Mobile Expectations Compared to Web
• Best Smartphones compared to average desktop/laptop
• Less CPU, Memory
• Smaller Screen Size
• Often used on slower network
• 85% of mobile users surveyed expect experience on mobile device to
be “as good or better than online via a computer”
http://portal.sliderocket.com/AHJJM/Tealeaf-Mobile-Transactions-Survey
• Frame Rates: 30 fps?
• Less than 50-60 fps and users report as “jerky”
• Early Android scrolling was 30 fps, now 60 fps

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Measuring Mobile Frustration
• EEG Study of tasks using iPhone with variable delays introduced
• 500 ms delay resulted in
• 26% increase in frustration
• 8% decrease in engagement
• http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2013/12/11/slower-web-pages-user-frustration/

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Responses to Mobile Frustration
• http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2011/10/21/phone-rage-how-people-react-to-slow-mobile-sites/

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Speed Matters on Mobile

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Mobile App Launch!
• Code complete!
• QA Passed!
• App Store Approval!
• User Reviews!!
App is Unusable!
by rsl345
Cool idea, but way too slow to use. Save yourself the frustration and use … instead.
• Followed by 30 more
• Phone rings
• What do you do?

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Launch Post-Mortem
• Review the QA tests
• Every performance test passed
• What tests were done?
• 25 comprehensive tests on 5 devices
• Using what network?
• Wifi in lab
• What about our beta testing?
• 10 employees using their iPhone 5/6 on LTE in the Bay
Area
• What’s different about the real user usage?
• More often than not, it’s the network

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But 4G networks are supposed to fix this, right?
-Max Firtman, Velocity, Extreme Mobile Performance

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But 4G networks are supposed to fix this, right?
-Max Firtman, Velocity, Extreme Mobile Performance

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Even on 4G, Latency is still a big issue

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Is the Answer More QA Performance Testing?
• Yes, and No
• Effective Mobile Performance
Testing is Hard & Expensive
• Permutations grow exponentially
• Device Types
• Network Type
• Signal Strength
• Carrier
• Etc
• Reality is your app users are
going to be exercising many
untested permutations
• So you need to monitor real end
user performance

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How Get Real End User Performance
• Have the app measure performance
• Add some timing code around network requests
• Time-intensive, so try to wrap NSURLConnection class
• Still time-intensive, and realize library uses AFNetworking
• Once data is collected, where do I send it, when?
• I have millions of users, how do I store it all?
• How do I make sense of the data?

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Mobile Application Performance Management
• Use a solution designed to solve this problem: Mobile APM
• Link MobileAPM library into your app
• Only code change required is couple lines of initialization
• Less than 5 minutes to add instrumentation
• What it does:
• Automatically times all network requests
• Records which ViewControllers were active during
which network requests
• Caches and sends results to cloud collection point in
the background

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Dimensions Automatically Tracked for Each Network
Request
• Network Type
• Signal Strength
• Location
• Carrier
• URL
• Start time
• Completion Time
• Response Time
• + Other metrics

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Login to Your Account for Detailed Analytics

19 Application Performance Monitoring

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App Screen Grouping Paradigm
• One app often makes many http requests
• Often one user action or one screen load requires multiple http
requests
• Closer to user experience
• Auto-Detect App Screen changes and group http requests by App
Screen

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Advanced Options
• Crash detection and reporting
• Exclude URL’s from tracking
• Customize your App Screen start/stop measurement points
• Add app specific timings
• Record errors / messages delivered to user
• Record handled exceptions

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Is Back-End the Problem?

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Follow Http(s) Requests through back-end
• If it is a back-end issue causing performance problem, you want to be able to easily go
from user perspective to back end execution details for that user’s request

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But What about Android?
• Android Supported Too
• For Android 2.3+, automatically detects any requests made through
• java.net.HttpURLConnection
• javax.net.ssl.HttpsURLConnection
• android.net.AndroidHttpClient
• org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient
• For iOS 7+, automatically detects any requests made through
• Foundation Framework
• AFNetworking 2.0

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Mobile App Performance Monitoring
• Deep visibility into performance of app for real users

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Mobile Performance Monitoring Options / Trade-Offs
Method Pros Cons
User Reviews No additional work Business Impact
More QA Perf Testing Catch more issues Expensive, incomplete
Build Own Mobile APM Customize collection and
analysis
Expensive, large effort,
compete with feature
development
Use 3rd Party Mobile
APM
Small quick effort
High Visibility
Pre-built analytics
Some additional
operational costs / SaaS
fees

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App Performance Design Tips
• Design with the network in mind, especially latency
• Asynchronous requests
• Cache
• Pre-fetch content likely needed soon
• Make fewer larger requests vs many smaller ones
• Be cognizant of 3rd party requests / dependencies
• Be network aware, degrade gracefully on slower networks and/or
poor signal strength
• Revert to lower resolution images
• Limit non-essential content

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App Performance Design Tips
• Perception is Reality
• Prioritize content to paint screen first, even if partial
• Give some feedback in 100 ms time limit
• Spinners?
• Can actually increase perceived time!
• Use judiciously, and do not display immediately
• Use animations to buy you more time and provide feedback
http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/perceived-performance

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Use Optimistic Actions When Possible
• Assume interaction with server will be successful
• Update UI for instantaneous feedback
• Examples
• Like in Facebook or Instagram
• Polar
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1759
http://www.mobify.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-perceived-performance/

Q&A
Steve Fox
steve.fox@software.dell.com
@MrSteveFox
Sign up for Free Trial! www.foglight.com

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