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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

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

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

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...