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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

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 ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

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 ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

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

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 ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

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 ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...