As the adoption and centrality of mobile business apps continue to grow, so does the need for enterprises and mobile carriers to ensure a flawless user experience.
A report by Compuware highlights the increasingly high expectations that users have for accessing sites on mobile phones and tablets. 57% of surveyed users said that they would not recommend a business that had a bad mobile site. Moreover, 46% would not return to that website and 40% had turned to a competitor’s site after a disappointing experience. Clearly, bad performance is bad for business.
Knowledge Is Power
With an ever-growing diversity of devices and operating systems on the market, you need to understand what's happening on your end users' devices. Your operations team needs real insight into response time and availability. At the same time, it is critical to align KPIs to what mobile users care about most.
The more you know about your end users' experience, the faster you can act to correct potential problems.
How long does it take for the application to load on the device? Can it perform login authentication?
Are there service availability degradations on different networks or particular geographies?
Is the application compliant with new mobile operating systems?
To know the answers to these questions, enterprises and mobile carriers need to implement mobile monitoring solutions that continuously measure native application performance on real devices.
Traditional Web Application Monitoring Tools Are Not Relevant
When it comes to the end user experience, web performance testing is mostly about network traffic, and how a web browser running on the desktop handles situations while the server is being loaded. A web browser is able to leverage the PC's capabilities and resources, most of which are not available on mobile devices.
This is not the case in the mobile world. Not only is the mobile device responsible for handling network traffic, it also must handle application processing and logic, authentication and encryption, native resource utilization (GPS, NFC, camera etc.), and application rendering. In mobile, the end user experience is the sum of all of these components, and it is no better than the weakest link in the entire chain.
Bottom Line: Make Mobile Monitoring Part of Your Mobile ALM Strategy
In today's mobile-centric business environment, there is an increasing need for real device mobile monitoring within an organization's overall mobile quality strategy. Only real device end-user monitoring for the key business transactions on the relevant mobile devices can provide organizations with the real-time insights on how the application behaves, and what end-users are experiencing on a specific device operating system and network.
Real-time mobile monitoring tools can serve as an early warning system to diagnose performance issues by isolating the device, application and network conditions to discover the root cause. Enterprises and mobile carriers should implement dedicated mobile monitoring solutions in order to maximize the user experience and meet business goals.
