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18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance - Part 1

Mobile apps are serious business. Every year mobile apps are becoming more critical to the way consumers buy, organizations do business, and the world communicates.

Earlier this year Flurry released a report on mobile app usage stating: "In the six years that Flurry has been reporting on our mobile app usage, and in some cases addiction, we’ve seen stunning growth. This last year was no different. According to Flurry Analytics, in 2014 overall app usage grew by 76%. In this context, Flurry defines app usage as a user opening an app and recording what we call a session. In 2014, Shopping, Utilities & Productivity, and Messaging experienced triple-digit growth and were the key drivers. As our mobile devices become more and more a part of our everyday lives, we are increasingly using them for always-on shopping, working, and communication. Where years past have seen massive growth in games and entertainment, 2014 was the year apps got down to serious business."

If mobile apps are becoming vital to business, then mobile app performance is key – from development through production.

"If you're not designing your apps with mobile users in mind, you are taking a big risk in terms of attracting and retaining your customers, and gaining their loyalty and commitment to coming back," warns David Jones, APM Evangelist.

With this in mind, APMdigest asked industry experts – from analysts and consultants to the top vendors – to recommend the best ways to ensure mobile app performance. The full list of 18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance will be posted over the next 4 days. With Part 1, we start at the beginning, at the development and testing stages.

1. BIZDEVOPS

The top way to ensure mobile application performance is through application governance, or BizDevOps. Better communication and collaboration between mobile dev, ops and QA teams, working in concert with business teams of application owners and users, allows for better application governance. Teams can determine what capabilities apps should have, and a faster feedback loop allows for changes to be made faster and more continuously. By moving performance management forward in the development cycle, teams can better understand dependencies and operational or quality issues across the entire application delivery chain – before apps are launched into production.
Gabe Lowy
Technology Analyst and Founder of TechTonics Advisors

2. DEVOPS

Highly performing mobile applications invariably share one common trait and that is robust testing in pre-production environments. Instrumenting mobile apps to collect critical business, performance and health data across languages, methodologies and platforms is not easy and requires real collaboration between development and operations. Operations teams must regularly share crash reports with development along with supporting stack traces, activity logs and code-level visibility needed to continually improve the next version of the app.
Aruna Ravichandran
VP Marketing, CA Product and Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies

Mobile performance excellence starts at the onset of an application's lifecycle and involves immediate collaboration and a committed transparency across all functional teams, including Product Management, Development, and IT Operations. As early as app conceptualization, product management should clearly communicate the app's intent, both the acceptable and optimum user experience, and the possible usage and behavioral variances between OS, device and user location. With this understanding, Development and IT Operations will be able monitor and optimize the various applications stack touch points in both the pre-production and production environments well before the app is ever rolled out.
Christopher Reynolds
Director, Product Management – Mobile APM, Aternity

Monitor every aspect of the application and it's infrastructure, from the backend all the way to the application rendering. Make sure that this practice is started from the moment you start building the product so that performance will be on everybody's mind, both Dev and Ops. Make performance a key KPI during development, test the performance in details during functional and/or performance testing and guaranty performance monitoring in production!
Coen Meerbeek
Online Performance Consultant and Founder of Blue Factory Internet

3. PERFORMANCE TESTING

Mobile performance assurance is best assured, following unit and functional testing, by a structured, integrated program of performance testing, at or above anticipated traffic levels. Such testing should combine wide ranging device emulation on an appropriate browser and consistent PC platform across public carrier networks in key global markets, and "real device" originated testing for key mobile devices, as determined, where possible, from web traffic analytics of the live application.
Larry Haig
Senior Consultant, Intechnica

Typically, consumers do not want to install a piece of software to monitor each application. However, an alternative exists – by leveraging synthetic testing to measure end user experience one can see where performance bottlenecks lie. This data helps answer the question: is it the network, the end point the user is going to, or the application itself?
Matt Goldberg
Senior Director of Service Provider Solutions, SevOne

4. NETWORK EMULATION

Delivering good performance of mobile applications is challenging due to the highly variable conditions of the mobile networks themselves. You can be getting sparkling 4G one minute but move a couple of blocks in another direction and it can be a very different experience. Therefore, when developing mobile apps you need to factor into your design and usability testing, the ability to function properly across networks that suffer from restricted bandwidths, high latencies and high data loss. The best way to achieve this is to ensure, at every stage of the development lifecycle, that you app is tested to see how it copes with the very worst conditions you can anticipate and the best way to achieve this is through the use of network emulation technology.
Frank Puranik
Senior Technical Specialist, iTrinegy

You must be obsessively cognizant that your user community is not solely comprised of residents of major cities with stable 4G and LTE signals. High latency, limited bandwidth and connectivity failures are the bane of mobile applications, so your QA methodology should leverage WAN emulation to test against worst-case scenarios. This will quickly reveal chatty and bulky parts of your application, as well as areas sensitive to losses in connectivity. NPM products with modeling capabilities can also be used to capture best-case transactions and virtually introduce complex network effects to predict worst-case performance.
Jon C. Hodgson
Global Consulting Engineer, Riverbed

Read Part 2 of 18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance, with recommendations all about mobile app design.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance - Part 1

Mobile apps are serious business. Every year mobile apps are becoming more critical to the way consumers buy, organizations do business, and the world communicates.

Earlier this year Flurry released a report on mobile app usage stating: "In the six years that Flurry has been reporting on our mobile app usage, and in some cases addiction, we’ve seen stunning growth. This last year was no different. According to Flurry Analytics, in 2014 overall app usage grew by 76%. In this context, Flurry defines app usage as a user opening an app and recording what we call a session. In 2014, Shopping, Utilities & Productivity, and Messaging experienced triple-digit growth and were the key drivers. As our mobile devices become more and more a part of our everyday lives, we are increasingly using them for always-on shopping, working, and communication. Where years past have seen massive growth in games and entertainment, 2014 was the year apps got down to serious business."

If mobile apps are becoming vital to business, then mobile app performance is key – from development through production.

"If you're not designing your apps with mobile users in mind, you are taking a big risk in terms of attracting and retaining your customers, and gaining their loyalty and commitment to coming back," warns David Jones, APM Evangelist.

With this in mind, APMdigest asked industry experts – from analysts and consultants to the top vendors – to recommend the best ways to ensure mobile app performance. The full list of 18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance will be posted over the next 4 days. With Part 1, we start at the beginning, at the development and testing stages.

1. BIZDEVOPS

The top way to ensure mobile application performance is through application governance, or BizDevOps. Better communication and collaboration between mobile dev, ops and QA teams, working in concert with business teams of application owners and users, allows for better application governance. Teams can determine what capabilities apps should have, and a faster feedback loop allows for changes to be made faster and more continuously. By moving performance management forward in the development cycle, teams can better understand dependencies and operational or quality issues across the entire application delivery chain – before apps are launched into production.
Gabe Lowy
Technology Analyst and Founder of TechTonics Advisors

2. DEVOPS

Highly performing mobile applications invariably share one common trait and that is robust testing in pre-production environments. Instrumenting mobile apps to collect critical business, performance and health data across languages, methodologies and platforms is not easy and requires real collaboration between development and operations. Operations teams must regularly share crash reports with development along with supporting stack traces, activity logs and code-level visibility needed to continually improve the next version of the app.
Aruna Ravichandran
VP Marketing, CA Product and Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies

Mobile performance excellence starts at the onset of an application's lifecycle and involves immediate collaboration and a committed transparency across all functional teams, including Product Management, Development, and IT Operations. As early as app conceptualization, product management should clearly communicate the app's intent, both the acceptable and optimum user experience, and the possible usage and behavioral variances between OS, device and user location. With this understanding, Development and IT Operations will be able monitor and optimize the various applications stack touch points in both the pre-production and production environments well before the app is ever rolled out.
Christopher Reynolds
Director, Product Management – Mobile APM, Aternity

Monitor every aspect of the application and it's infrastructure, from the backend all the way to the application rendering. Make sure that this practice is started from the moment you start building the product so that performance will be on everybody's mind, both Dev and Ops. Make performance a key KPI during development, test the performance in details during functional and/or performance testing and guaranty performance monitoring in production!
Coen Meerbeek
Online Performance Consultant and Founder of Blue Factory Internet

3. PERFORMANCE TESTING

Mobile performance assurance is best assured, following unit and functional testing, by a structured, integrated program of performance testing, at or above anticipated traffic levels. Such testing should combine wide ranging device emulation on an appropriate browser and consistent PC platform across public carrier networks in key global markets, and "real device" originated testing for key mobile devices, as determined, where possible, from web traffic analytics of the live application.
Larry Haig
Senior Consultant, Intechnica

Typically, consumers do not want to install a piece of software to monitor each application. However, an alternative exists – by leveraging synthetic testing to measure end user experience one can see where performance bottlenecks lie. This data helps answer the question: is it the network, the end point the user is going to, or the application itself?
Matt Goldberg
Senior Director of Service Provider Solutions, SevOne

4. NETWORK EMULATION

Delivering good performance of mobile applications is challenging due to the highly variable conditions of the mobile networks themselves. You can be getting sparkling 4G one minute but move a couple of blocks in another direction and it can be a very different experience. Therefore, when developing mobile apps you need to factor into your design and usability testing, the ability to function properly across networks that suffer from restricted bandwidths, high latencies and high data loss. The best way to achieve this is to ensure, at every stage of the development lifecycle, that you app is tested to see how it copes with the very worst conditions you can anticipate and the best way to achieve this is through the use of network emulation technology.
Frank Puranik
Senior Technical Specialist, iTrinegy

You must be obsessively cognizant that your user community is not solely comprised of residents of major cities with stable 4G and LTE signals. High latency, limited bandwidth and connectivity failures are the bane of mobile applications, so your QA methodology should leverage WAN emulation to test against worst-case scenarios. This will quickly reveal chatty and bulky parts of your application, as well as areas sensitive to losses in connectivity. NPM products with modeling capabilities can also be used to capture best-case transactions and virtually introduce complex network effects to predict worst-case performance.
Jon C. Hodgson
Global Consulting Engineer, Riverbed

Read Part 2 of 18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance, with recommendations all about mobile app design.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...