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18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance - Part 2

Mobile apps are serious business, and mobile app performance is key. 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. Part 2 of the list is all about mobile app design.

Start with Part 1 of the List

5. MOBILE APP DESIGN: KEEP IT SIMPLE

Access to information and business apps is essential for a successful mobile performance. Eliminating complexity in mobile app design while monitoring the health of the supporting IT infrastructure makes for a better end user experience. Because of uncontrollable factors outside the office such as inconsistent Wi-Fi strength, it's best to keep it simple.
Aaron Kelly
VP of Product Management, Ipswitch

6. MOBILE APP DESIGN: MINIMIZE NETWORK REQUESTS

Aside from proper back-end load testing, we found that the best performance gains are obtained by minimizing the number of network requests the mobile app requires.
Alon Girmonsky
Founder and CEO, BlazeMeter

7. MOBILE APP DESIGN: OPTIMIZE CONTENT

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. Make sure to adjust your apps for mobile users. Even if you are using a third party to develop your mobile app, make sure to instrument the app itself to get some real user visibility. Also, if you try to push the same content out over mobile as you do over web, the site's performance will suffer. We repeatedly see organizations with fantastic web performance fall flat with mobile because they tried to push out the same content regardless of the device used to access it. If you want to win in today's omni-channel environment then you have to realize the playing field is not the same as it was a few years ago. You need to provide a strong digital experience across all channels and tailor it for mobile users."
David Jones
APM Evangelist, Dynatrace

Some of the most prominent sites on the Internet frequently experience performance issues thanks to oversized images that are not properly formatted for mobile usage. Mobile sites don't actually require full-sized images, and with an ever increasing portion of Internet traffic coming from mobile devices, optimizing images can serve as an easy means for companies to avoid losing users.
Kent Alstad
VP of Acceleration, Radware

Reduce the size of the site. We see many people who have a responsive site design, which scales the elements to fit the device on which the site is being viewed, fails to shrink images, Javascript, etc. When you're delivering 2 MB of data through images and video files, site usability design isn't enough to give you good performance; you have to shave off as many bytes as you can.
Drit Suljoti
Chief Product Officer, Catchpoint

8. MOBILE APP DESIGN: NATIVE APPS

While it's tempting to jump start your app development by using a hybrid approach, sharing code and resources with an existing web-based application, your mobile users will often have less optimal network conditions than your desktop web-based users. The best way to ensure mobile performance is to develop a native app, using local resources whenever possible.
Tana Jackson
VP of Engineering, SOASTA

Read Part 3 of 18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance, covering the production side including Application Performance Management, monitoring and more.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance - Part 2

Mobile apps are serious business, and mobile app performance is key. 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. Part 2 of the list is all about mobile app design.

Start with Part 1 of the List

5. MOBILE APP DESIGN: KEEP IT SIMPLE

Access to information and business apps is essential for a successful mobile performance. Eliminating complexity in mobile app design while monitoring the health of the supporting IT infrastructure makes for a better end user experience. Because of uncontrollable factors outside the office such as inconsistent Wi-Fi strength, it's best to keep it simple.
Aaron Kelly
VP of Product Management, Ipswitch

6. MOBILE APP DESIGN: MINIMIZE NETWORK REQUESTS

Aside from proper back-end load testing, we found that the best performance gains are obtained by minimizing the number of network requests the mobile app requires.
Alon Girmonsky
Founder and CEO, BlazeMeter

7. MOBILE APP DESIGN: OPTIMIZE CONTENT

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. Make sure to adjust your apps for mobile users. Even if you are using a third party to develop your mobile app, make sure to instrument the app itself to get some real user visibility. Also, if you try to push the same content out over mobile as you do over web, the site's performance will suffer. We repeatedly see organizations with fantastic web performance fall flat with mobile because they tried to push out the same content regardless of the device used to access it. If you want to win in today's omni-channel environment then you have to realize the playing field is not the same as it was a few years ago. You need to provide a strong digital experience across all channels and tailor it for mobile users."
David Jones
APM Evangelist, Dynatrace

Some of the most prominent sites on the Internet frequently experience performance issues thanks to oversized images that are not properly formatted for mobile usage. Mobile sites don't actually require full-sized images, and with an ever increasing portion of Internet traffic coming from mobile devices, optimizing images can serve as an easy means for companies to avoid losing users.
Kent Alstad
VP of Acceleration, Radware

Reduce the size of the site. We see many people who have a responsive site design, which scales the elements to fit the device on which the site is being viewed, fails to shrink images, Javascript, etc. When you're delivering 2 MB of data through images and video files, site usability design isn't enough to give you good performance; you have to shave off as many bytes as you can.
Drit Suljoti
Chief Product Officer, Catchpoint

8. MOBILE APP DESIGN: NATIVE APPS

While it's tempting to jump start your app development by using a hybrid approach, sharing code and resources with an existing web-based application, your mobile users will often have less optimal network conditions than your desktop web-based users. The best way to ensure mobile performance is to develop a native app, using local resources whenever possible.
Tana Jackson
VP of Engineering, SOASTA

Read Part 3 of 18 Ways to Ensure Mobile App Performance, covering the production side including Application Performance Management, monitoring and more.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...