Mobile Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools

With the abundance of apps available, mobile users now have a really low tolerance towards apps with poor performance. This is not limited to bugs and crashes as users also take things just like the app’s speed and battery consumption into consideration. According to a report by Dimensional Research, 49% of users expect apps to start in two seconds or less, and 80% would give a poorly performing app three chances or less before uninstalling it. The research also found that 69% of users say that poor app experiences lower their opinions of the company that created it.

In this post, we will get a detailed look at Instabug, the ideal option when it involves mobile application performance monitoring (APM) tools available. This tool can help you monitor not only your app’s crashes but also errors, network requests, UI hangs, and more.

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Instabug App Performance Monitoring (APM) 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.

Using an APM tool for mobile apps 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. You'll be able to identify possible bottleneck situations and keep your app running as fast as possible. By staying on top of monitoring, you can allocate and adjust resources to keep your app performing to the best of its capabilities.

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Instabug’s APM tool is built from the ground up specifically for mobile teams to be able to:

• Align around a single metric that represents your app's quality
• Proactively discover issues that affect your users when your app runs in the wild
• Decipher vague customer complaints around app speed, loading, and bugs
• Efficiently balance between performance improvements and feature development

Instabug's APM features include:

• UI Hangs: Easily spot if your users are encountering UI hangs on any of your app's screens. You can easily detect frustrating scenarios where the app isn't responding to the user fast enough.
• App Launch: Monitor how long your users are waiting since they click on your app to when your app becomes responsive. App launch time shapes your users' first impressions and is key to a good experience.
• Network Performance: Server-side monitoring won't give you the full picture. You will be able to track response times and network errors as seen by your users. And fully customize your thresholds for critical calls.
• Executions Traces: Monitor the performance of your client-side logic by customizing thresholds for specific traces and assessing how well they're performing.
• App Apdex: Have one north star metric that reflects the overall quality of your app as perceived by your users. You will be able to instantly tell how many users are having a satisfying, frustrating, or tolerable experience.

Traditionally APM has been seen as an infrastructure focused tool, and because of that many developers are unaware of how mobile apps can benefit. So let's take a step back and explore that.

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The idea behind APM tools is to help easily diagnose and assess different problems in relation to how an app is performing. It can also be defined as: "The translation of IT metrics into business meaning (value)”. Specifically, APM tools help monitor the end-user experience. This includes metrics like how fast the application opens and how long it takes requests to execute.

When it comes to mobile apps as we highlighted at the beginning of the article, there are a lot of apps around and the bar for quality and performance is much higher.  App performance directly affects users' satisfaction and experience, and this negatively impacts key business metrics like downloads, usage, retention, and revenue.

A mobile APM tool will alert you about things like slow screen transitions, slow network calls, and UI hangs that also negatively impact your end users' experience. With an APM tool like Instabug's, you can take a proactive approach to discover and fix performance issues in your application before these problems become bug reports.

The best way to use APM is not to work backwards and fix issues that arise late; ideally you'll be working forwards to constantly monitor and continuously improve your app's performance.