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Nearly 90 Percent Surveyed Stop Using Apps Due to Poor Performance

Nearly 90 percent surveyed stopped using an app due to poor performance, according to The App Attention Span Study, conducted by AppDynamics in partnership with the Institute of Management Studies (IMS) at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The App Attention Span investigated the impact of the increasing importance and use of mobile devices on aspects of people’s behavior, and the corresponding business implications. It reveals that, as people’s attention spans for poor-performing apps shorten, the stakes are high for any business that depends on its website or mobile app.

“With Forrester analysts projecting US mobile commerce sales alone to top $100 billion in 2014, our study underlines the importance of well performing apps,” said Tom Levey, technical evangelist at AppDynamics. “Web and mobile apps now play a prominent role in people’s lives and are central to a huge, growing digital economy.”

“Users experience a lot of negative emotions and frustrations when trying to complete some digital tasks and apps or web pages are slow to load,” said Dr. Chris Brauer, director of innovation, IMS at Goldsmiths, University of London. “Our attention span demands have adapted dramatically to the available technologies.”

Mobile applications alone now account for 25 percent of all Internet traffic, with 1.6 billion users worldwide, according to a recent report by Kleiner Perkins. In today’s digital economy, just a few seconds of app or website downtime can have a severe impact on business revenues, reputation and customer satisfaction.

The report, which includes findings from US and UK adult smartphone and tablet owners, suggests that the pressure on businesses on both sides of the pond is set to increase:

■ 65 percent of respondents agreed that their expectations of app performance are increasing over time

■ Close to half of all respondents are less tolerant of problems with apps or websites than they used to be

■ Nearly one third of smartphone and tablet owners would change banks if a mobile app wasn’t up to par

The research also shows that users don’t have much patience for poor-performing apps: 86 percent deleted or uninstalled at least one mobile app because of problems with its performance. Yet, the research indicates that smartphone and tablet owners reward businesses that get it right online:

■ 30 percent would spend more money with an organization that had a good mobile app

■ 29 percent would pay more for a product or service if the organization’s app performed better than its competitors’

“In so many ways, for so many businesses, success is now defined by software, as customers expect seamless performance and reliability from all digital services. Tellingly, our study shows that 19 percent of respondents believe they are more loyal to an app than a brand,” said Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics. “The bottom line is that organizations must deliver a reliable, consistent mobile experience to grow and protect increasingly important mobile device revenue streams and customer interactions, even under the most demanding situations. Key to this is having the necessary depth of application intelligence in real time so that any problems can be anticipated or rapidly solved.”

Dr. Brauer concludes, saying: “Asset-lite and information-rich organizations are disrupting every industry from taxis to accommodation, retail, entertainment, and logistics. The choice is either to transform into a software-defined business or figure out how you are going to compete with software-defined businesses. No sector of the economy or society will be immune to this challenge.”

Other key findings of The App Attention Span include:

■ Performance – whether it’s pages taking too long to load or browsing being slow and difficult – is the top frustration of respondents when using mobile apps and websites

■ 65 percent of respondents have experienced a mobile app crash in the past 12 months

■ For US adults surveyed, 38 percent try another app when faced with a problem, 34 percent stop using the app, and 19 percent complain to friends and family

■ Nearly three quarters (73 percent) of respondents said that banking apps were the type of apps for which flawless performance is most important, followed by travel booking services and e-commerce apps

■ For 11 percent of respondents, flawless execution was most important to entertainment apps

■ 27 percent of people surveyed said completing transactions using mobile apps is too complicated and fraught with problems

Dustin Whittle is a Developer Evangelist at AppDynamics.

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Nearly 90 Percent Surveyed Stop Using Apps Due to Poor Performance

Nearly 90 percent surveyed stopped using an app due to poor performance, according to The App Attention Span Study, conducted by AppDynamics in partnership with the Institute of Management Studies (IMS) at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The App Attention Span investigated the impact of the increasing importance and use of mobile devices on aspects of people’s behavior, and the corresponding business implications. It reveals that, as people’s attention spans for poor-performing apps shorten, the stakes are high for any business that depends on its website or mobile app.

“With Forrester analysts projecting US mobile commerce sales alone to top $100 billion in 2014, our study underlines the importance of well performing apps,” said Tom Levey, technical evangelist at AppDynamics. “Web and mobile apps now play a prominent role in people’s lives and are central to a huge, growing digital economy.”

“Users experience a lot of negative emotions and frustrations when trying to complete some digital tasks and apps or web pages are slow to load,” said Dr. Chris Brauer, director of innovation, IMS at Goldsmiths, University of London. “Our attention span demands have adapted dramatically to the available technologies.”

Mobile applications alone now account for 25 percent of all Internet traffic, with 1.6 billion users worldwide, according to a recent report by Kleiner Perkins. In today’s digital economy, just a few seconds of app or website downtime can have a severe impact on business revenues, reputation and customer satisfaction.

The report, which includes findings from US and UK adult smartphone and tablet owners, suggests that the pressure on businesses on both sides of the pond is set to increase:

■ 65 percent of respondents agreed that their expectations of app performance are increasing over time

■ Close to half of all respondents are less tolerant of problems with apps or websites than they used to be

■ Nearly one third of smartphone and tablet owners would change banks if a mobile app wasn’t up to par

The research also shows that users don’t have much patience for poor-performing apps: 86 percent deleted or uninstalled at least one mobile app because of problems with its performance. Yet, the research indicates that smartphone and tablet owners reward businesses that get it right online:

■ 30 percent would spend more money with an organization that had a good mobile app

■ 29 percent would pay more for a product or service if the organization’s app performed better than its competitors’

“In so many ways, for so many businesses, success is now defined by software, as customers expect seamless performance and reliability from all digital services. Tellingly, our study shows that 19 percent of respondents believe they are more loyal to an app than a brand,” said Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics. “The bottom line is that organizations must deliver a reliable, consistent mobile experience to grow and protect increasingly important mobile device revenue streams and customer interactions, even under the most demanding situations. Key to this is having the necessary depth of application intelligence in real time so that any problems can be anticipated or rapidly solved.”

Dr. Brauer concludes, saying: “Asset-lite and information-rich organizations are disrupting every industry from taxis to accommodation, retail, entertainment, and logistics. The choice is either to transform into a software-defined business or figure out how you are going to compete with software-defined businesses. No sector of the economy or society will be immune to this challenge.”

Other key findings of The App Attention Span include:

■ Performance – whether it’s pages taking too long to load or browsing being slow and difficult – is the top frustration of respondents when using mobile apps and websites

■ 65 percent of respondents have experienced a mobile app crash in the past 12 months

■ For US adults surveyed, 38 percent try another app when faced with a problem, 34 percent stop using the app, and 19 percent complain to friends and family

■ Nearly three quarters (73 percent) of respondents said that banking apps were the type of apps for which flawless performance is most important, followed by travel booking services and e-commerce apps

■ For 11 percent of respondents, flawless execution was most important to entertainment apps

■ 27 percent of people surveyed said completing transactions using mobile apps is too complicated and fraught with problems

Dustin Whittle is a Developer Evangelist at AppDynamics.

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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 ...

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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 ...

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