Introducing Flutter Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

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Monitoring app performance helps you take a proactive approach towards improving quality instead of waiting for a crash or error to occur or hearing negative feedback from users. Instabug’s Flutter APM tool helps you track key metrics to improve your app’s performance, including Apdex scores, UI hangs, network timeouts and issues, slow launches, tracking custom traces, and more.

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App Apdex scores

With a lot of granular metrics like network calls, screen hangs, etc, it can be complicated to understand how your app quality is performing overall. The app Apdex score takes several variables into account and is a single numerical representation of your app's performance. With this quick tell-all score, you'll have a measurable signal of how your app's performance is doing holistically. And it makes it much easier to align the team around one KPI and communicate it to all stakeholders.

Instabug's app Apdex score tells you whether your app's overall user experience is Unacceptable, Poor, Fair, Good, or Excellent, and you can track it over time and across versions. For more granular analysis, you can also see individual Apdex scores for app launch, specific app traces, and specific network requests.

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UI hangs

You need to know if your users are experiencing any UI hangs, or if any part of your app's UI is unresponsive. If your app responds slowly, your users will feel frustrated because they have high expectations. Users have been conditioned to expect quick and accessible experiences, and if they face UI hangs, it can cause them to abandon your app and hurt their impression of your brand. UI hangs are assessed by comparing your app's delay in responding to a user input to the total amount of time they spend on a certain screen.

Instabug APM shows you a detailed distribution of UI hang occurrences per screen to help you easily identify where your app's UI is unresponsive. You can also define custom UI traces to monitor for more control over how your occurrences are grouped. Filters and patterns help you quickly narrow down where an issue is occurring and optimize accordingly.

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Network performance

While it is important to monitor server-side network performance, it doesn’t represent the whole story. Tracking response times and errors from your users' standpoint will also offer key insights about your app's performance and quality. Monitoring both will help you determine whether your app's overall network performance is poor, average, or good.

With Instabug's SDK, you can track the full round trip of your network requests as seen on the client-side and be alerted to timeouts and issues. To help you identify and act on issues faster, you'll be alerted about common network failures. For even more control and visibility, you can also track custom URL patterns. And with different filtering options, you can easily spot trends and pinpoint where problems are coming from.

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Execution traces

Another important aspect to measure is how long any client-side logic takes to complete. Instabug's APM tool can automatically fetch app traces and determine whether they are slow to execute. With Instabug, you can define custom execution traces to track, and you can set target thresholds for your traces so that you can easily spot where performance issues are occurring in your code and not meeting your KPIs.

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App launches

This is the first gate that your app users face. App launch monitoring shows you how long users are waiting until the app loads and is responsive. A user's first impression is crucial and often sets the tone for the rest of their experience. If it starts with a long app launch time, then you've already frustrated your user before they've even got into your app, and they're more likely to have a negative overall impression.

With Instabug APM you can determine if slow launches are related to app versions, devices, or OS versions. You can also set a threshold for the app launch time you're trying to achieve so that you can determine if it's poor, average, or good.

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Use Instabug APM with Crash Reporting and Bug Reporting

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For the best results, use Instabug's APM, Crash Reporting, and Bug Reporting together to have a complete picture of your app's quality, performance, and stability. Each tool is essential on its own, and when combined, the sum is even greater than its parts and you'll have all the data and information you need at your fingertips to deliver the fastest and most reliable experience for your users, and outperform your competition.

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Crash Reporting

Probably the biggest indicator of your app’s performance is its stability. An app crashing too often is a surefire way to lose users for good. Since crashes specifically are fatal errors and completely stop the user from using the app, they can become a huge issue quickly. It’s important to measure your app’s stability score and to keep constant track of it. One of the best ways to monitor your app’s health is to have a strong crash reporting tool like Instabug.

Instabug's detailed crash reports help you figure out the root cause of an issue quickly so that you can resolve the problem more effectively. When a crash occurs, and crashes are an inevitable occurrence, you need to know about it well before negative reviews are posted. With Instabug, you'll be alerted to your app’s crashes in real-time so you can act fast and fix them before they impact more of your users.

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Bug Reporting

It is impossible to avoid bugs altogether. Similar to crashes, the best way to handle them is to be able to quickly detect, diagnose, and fix them before they affect a lot of users. Instabug's bug reporting tool makes it as easy as possible for your testers and users to report bugs and as easy as possible for your developers to understand the problem and fix it. This is crucial for both internal testing and for live apps.

And while APM and crash reporting are important to app quality, they're missing a critical dimension: the voice of your users. With bug reporting, you complete the picture by collecting real user feedback, from which you can learn tons of valuable insights.