Five major performance issues in 2014 apps and their solutions

The boom of mobile Internet has given rise to the mobile application business. In the past year, more than 600,000 apps have been launched, or in other words, more than 800 apps are released every day.

In such fierce competition, many apps are short-lived, but many stand out. In addition to creativity and functions, performance has become the key to the survival of an app.

Although there are many different types of mobile application performance issues, the performance of an app can be measured through five aspects: crash rate, error rate, network request response time, interactive performance, and operator network response time.

All data in this article comes from the "2014 China Mobile Application Performance White Paper" released by Tingyun.

1. Mobile app crashes:

The forced closing (Force Closing) phenomenon that occurs during the operation of the application interrupts the user's ongoing operation experience.

This is also an aspect that has the greatest impact on user experience. In addition to interrupting key services and reducing ARPU, user retention will decrease, and DAU and MAU will continue to decline. This will reduce brand reputation and increase CPA (cost per user acquisition), which will in turn affect the life-cycle value.

After investigation and research, it was found that when the crash rate of iOS exceeded 8‰ and the crash rate of Android exceeded 4‰, the number of active users showed a significant downward trend.

It is not difficult to see from the table that 2014 was the year with the fastest development of mobile Internet. Perhaps due to the pursuit of speed, the average crash rate of both iOS and Android exceeded the standard value, and there were generally minor hidden dangers.

iOS operating system crash distribution: iOS 5.0.1, iOS 5.1.1, iOS8.0.1, iOS 8.1.2, and iOS8.1.3 are the operating systems with the most crashes. Among them, iOS 7x has stable overall crash performance. Support for the latest operating system versions and continued compatibility with older versions are what mobile developers must pay attention to.

Android operating system crash distribution: Android 2.x performed poorly. After Android 4.x, the crash rate stabilized at 2‰-4‰, which performed well.

iOS crash model distribution

Top 20 Android Crash Models

However, how to fix a crash? Experts believe that when a crash occurs, a crash report will be created and stored on the crashed device. The crash report describes the conditions under which the application crashed. In most cases, it contains a complete stack trace of the currently running thread. The stack information can be used to infer the cause of the crash and make corrections.

2. Mobile App Errors

As the name implies, HTTP errors (HTTP status code ①) and network error summaries that occur in the production environment of the application will cause the application page to fail to display, affecting the user experience. Just like a crash, when an error occurs, the key business of the APP will be interrupted, affecting the user experience and thus affecting the APP's revenue.

Distribution of mobile application errors in 2014

It can be seen that the internal server error with error code 500 has become the most serious problem in APP errors. This error causes the server to be unable to provide services, and the user will be in a vacuum state. For an APP, this is undoubtedly terrible.

3. Mobile application request response time

The time it takes for an application to send an HTTP request to a host and for the host to return a response. If the response time is too long, the end user experience will be slow, the user experience will deteriorate, and the user retention rate will be reduced.

After research, it was found that when the request response time exceeds 2000ms, users begin to lose!

4. Mobile application interactive performance

The time it takes for users to interact with the interface elements and content of mobile applications is called interactive performance time. The degradation of user experience caused by the long loading time of the application's page elements is called slow interaction. When there is a problem with the interactive performance of mobile applications, it will cause the page elements to load slowly, causing the application to freeze, and the incomplete page elements will cause layout disorder.

When this problem occurs, we should note that page loading is divided into front-end UI threads and background worker threads, and the bottleneck of slow interaction can be determined by the time taken by each thread to call the method.

5. Operator network response time

It can be seen that the response time varies in different regions, so the author believes that some targeted adjustments can be made in the development of APPs based on the differences in different regions, just like Facebook in Africa, optimizing the image format and functions.

Conclusion:

Google once published a set of data. In 2014, the total number of developers worldwide reached 715,000, and the number of mobile applications worldwide reached 3.063 million, a year-on-year increase of 45.8% in 2013. However, it is unknown whether these more than 3 million apps can develop sustainably. With the acceleration of the iteration of mobile applications, most apps will encounter obstacles in their development or even die on the road to progress. In early 2015, an app called "Footprints" that was once popular in WeChat Moments was called "China's Instagram" for its movie-style screenshots, subtitles, margins and filters, which could turn an ordinary photo into a movie blockbuster. However, although it broke through the siege and became popular all over the country, it had to shut down or downgrade some non-core functions of the app due to server performance issues, and it almost died.

As the competition in the APP market becomes increasingly fierce, performance issues have become an inevitable pain point for APP developers. It is unacceptable for an APP team or company to have good ideas and killer features but fail due to performance issues.