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Native Mobile App Performance: Measure What Matters

Aaron Rudger

Companies have been putting tremendous effort into improving the performance of their Web and mobile channels to ensure a successful end user experience. This past holiday season, it was put to test as sales on mobile devices were the highest they’ve ever been, accounting for 55 percent of e-commerce traffic on Black Friday and 412 percent on Cyber Monday.

Keynote recently monitored and measured the experience of 16 native iOS and Android apps from eight top retailers. Not surprisingly, the study reported that 8 out of every 10 apps experienced a failure in the 2 week period.

The benchmark studied the shopping experience and the length of interaction across six stages from launching an app, searching for an item, getting the product details, adding to the wish list, checking the product review and finding the store location to correlate its impact on company revenues and customer engagement.

Key Findings of the Study

■ 80 percent of mobile native apps experienced a performance failure

■ The study found an average of 98.2 percent uptime. For a company with $1 billion annual mobile sales, this can result in revenue leakage of $1.4 million per month

■ The average time it took to carry out all six transactions was 18.7 seconds

■ Top tier apps based on engagement outperformed bottom ones by 33 percent

■ iOS apps performed 40 percent faster than the Android apps, which corresponds to an 18.5 percent higher average order of iOS customers than Android users

These findings underscore that the expectations of speed, reliability and quality are becoming increasingly difficult to deliver in the digital experience, and mobile is the latest but also the least understood area. The development and deployment frameworks, architectures and KPIs used to deliver Web experiences translate poorly to native mobile apps. And yet, for those companies that get mobile application delivery and performance right, the upside is great.

As the next generation of consumers increasingly depends on their smartphones and tablets to interact with your brand, now is the time to understand mobile performance and quality. Delivery without analysis is no longer acceptable. Specifically in retail, with the growth of mobile technology, today's retailers and brand owners are challenged to think about the new overall consumer experience.

Aaron Rudger is Director of Product Marketing at Keynote.

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Native Mobile App Performance: Measure What Matters

Aaron Rudger

Companies have been putting tremendous effort into improving the performance of their Web and mobile channels to ensure a successful end user experience. This past holiday season, it was put to test as sales on mobile devices were the highest they’ve ever been, accounting for 55 percent of e-commerce traffic on Black Friday and 412 percent on Cyber Monday.

Keynote recently monitored and measured the experience of 16 native iOS and Android apps from eight top retailers. Not surprisingly, the study reported that 8 out of every 10 apps experienced a failure in the 2 week period.

The benchmark studied the shopping experience and the length of interaction across six stages from launching an app, searching for an item, getting the product details, adding to the wish list, checking the product review and finding the store location to correlate its impact on company revenues and customer engagement.

Key Findings of the Study

■ 80 percent of mobile native apps experienced a performance failure

■ The study found an average of 98.2 percent uptime. For a company with $1 billion annual mobile sales, this can result in revenue leakage of $1.4 million per month

■ The average time it took to carry out all six transactions was 18.7 seconds

■ Top tier apps based on engagement outperformed bottom ones by 33 percent

■ iOS apps performed 40 percent faster than the Android apps, which corresponds to an 18.5 percent higher average order of iOS customers than Android users

These findings underscore that the expectations of speed, reliability and quality are becoming increasingly difficult to deliver in the digital experience, and mobile is the latest but also the least understood area. The development and deployment frameworks, architectures and KPIs used to deliver Web experiences translate poorly to native mobile apps. And yet, for those companies that get mobile application delivery and performance right, the upside is great.

As the next generation of consumers increasingly depends on their smartphones and tablets to interact with your brand, now is the time to understand mobile performance and quality. Delivery without analysis is no longer acceptable. Specifically in retail, with the growth of mobile technology, today's retailers and brand owners are challenged to think about the new overall consumer experience.

Aaron Rudger is Director of Product Marketing at Keynote.

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...