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2022 App Stability Report: Driving Quality with Visibility

Michael Olechna
Guardsquare

Users today expect a seamless, uninterrupted experience when interacting with their web and mobile apps. Their expectations have continued to grow in tandem with their appetite for new features and consistent updates. Mobile apps have responded by increasing their release cadence by up to 40%, releasing a new full version of their app every 4-5 days, as determined in this year's SmartBear State of Software Quality | Application Stability Index report. When examining last year's report, mobile apps were on average issuing a new release once a week, about once every seven days. To accommodate the market's new standard of faster releases, a growing number of mobile apps are adopting progressive delivery practices, like feature flags and experiments, to accelerate the release of new features while minimizing the risk of releasing new errors to their user base that would impact the stability of their applications. Stability score measures the percentage of app sessions that are crash-free, providing visibility into app health as well as user experience. It can be thought of as a barometer of quality and quantity: the lower the number of errors in your app, the higher your stability score is and the quality of your app. Overall, there is a continuing trend of increasing stability among web and mobile apps with the industry striving for five nines or 99.999% stability. In last year's report, mobile apps had a median stability score of 99.80%. In the 2020 report, the last direct comparison of web and mobile app stability score, mobile apps outscored web apps by a significant margin, 99.63% to 99.39%. Perhaps the most surprising finding of this year's report is the revelation web apps had a higher stability score, 99.94%, than their mobile counterparts score of 99.88%. Diving deeper into the data provides some insight into why web app scores were much higher than in 2020 and against this year's mobile median score. The top two industries by stability score in the report were Media and Entertainment, 99.97% and e-commerce, 99.94%. Media and Entertainment had a strong web app presence, especially with the takeoff of streaming media in the past year. As many newcomers attempt to grow their users, it remains essential for them to provide an optimal, uninterrupted experience. Meanwhile, to retain their massive subscriber base against increased competition, streaming giants seek to strike a balance between delivering a seamless experience and consistently offering new features to enhance their application — across a range of devices. On the other hand, perhaps no better example of the link between stability and revenue can be thought of than e-commerce applications. The last moment any organization wants their app to crash is during the checkout process. As worldwide e-commerce revenue expects to climb past $5.5 trillion in 2022, one can assume there is a lot of money in customers' carts when they arrive at checkout. Giving customers a smooth experience is paramount, as crashes directly impact revenue. These two industries provide a model that the lowest scoring industries in the report can learn from. As in previous reports, Gaming was the lowest scoring industry at 99.60%, with the widest range of score distribution between apps. Health and Wellness did not fare much better, scoring the second-lowest at 99.71%. The low stability score of Health and Wellness combined with its median release cadence of every other day and the widest release distribution of all industries demonstrates a balance must be reached between roadmap agility and app stability. With the user experience becoming increasingly dominant to app success, app stability has evolved into application observability as the need for visibility into software releases has grown. Perhaps most importantly, we're learning that visibility into app stability is key for innovating quickly and delivering apps with speed and confidence.

Michael Olechna is Product Marketing Manager at Guardsquare

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2022 App Stability Report: Driving Quality with Visibility

Michael Olechna
Guardsquare

Users today expect a seamless, uninterrupted experience when interacting with their web and mobile apps. Their expectations have continued to grow in tandem with their appetite for new features and consistent updates. Mobile apps have responded by increasing their release cadence by up to 40%, releasing a new full version of their app every 4-5 days, as determined in this year's SmartBear State of Software Quality | Application Stability Index report. When examining last year's report, mobile apps were on average issuing a new release once a week, about once every seven days. To accommodate the market's new standard of faster releases, a growing number of mobile apps are adopting progressive delivery practices, like feature flags and experiments, to accelerate the release of new features while minimizing the risk of releasing new errors to their user base that would impact the stability of their applications. Stability score measures the percentage of app sessions that are crash-free, providing visibility into app health as well as user experience. It can be thought of as a barometer of quality and quantity: the lower the number of errors in your app, the higher your stability score is and the quality of your app. Overall, there is a continuing trend of increasing stability among web and mobile apps with the industry striving for five nines or 99.999% stability. In last year's report, mobile apps had a median stability score of 99.80%. In the 2020 report, the last direct comparison of web and mobile app stability score, mobile apps outscored web apps by a significant margin, 99.63% to 99.39%. Perhaps the most surprising finding of this year's report is the revelation web apps had a higher stability score, 99.94%, than their mobile counterparts score of 99.88%. Diving deeper into the data provides some insight into why web app scores were much higher than in 2020 and against this year's mobile median score. The top two industries by stability score in the report were Media and Entertainment, 99.97% and e-commerce, 99.94%. Media and Entertainment had a strong web app presence, especially with the takeoff of streaming media in the past year. As many newcomers attempt to grow their users, it remains essential for them to provide an optimal, uninterrupted experience. Meanwhile, to retain their massive subscriber base against increased competition, streaming giants seek to strike a balance between delivering a seamless experience and consistently offering new features to enhance their application — across a range of devices. On the other hand, perhaps no better example of the link between stability and revenue can be thought of than e-commerce applications. The last moment any organization wants their app to crash is during the checkout process. As worldwide e-commerce revenue expects to climb past $5.5 trillion in 2022, one can assume there is a lot of money in customers' carts when they arrive at checkout. Giving customers a smooth experience is paramount, as crashes directly impact revenue. These two industries provide a model that the lowest scoring industries in the report can learn from. As in previous reports, Gaming was the lowest scoring industry at 99.60%, with the widest range of score distribution between apps. Health and Wellness did not fare much better, scoring the second-lowest at 99.71%. The low stability score of Health and Wellness combined with its median release cadence of every other day and the widest release distribution of all industries demonstrates a balance must be reached between roadmap agility and app stability. With the user experience becoming increasingly dominant to app success, app stability has evolved into application observability as the need for visibility into software releases has grown. Perhaps most importantly, we're learning that visibility into app stability is key for innovating quickly and delivering apps with speed and confidence.

Michael Olechna is Product Marketing Manager at Guardsquare

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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

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2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

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