Why Performance Matters

When an app needs to be updated, you will go to the App Store or Google Play to begin the update.  Your eye might catch the “what’s new” right below the update button.  In many cases, the update contains performance improvements.

Performance is a key factor in the success of any application.  Do you keep using apps that are slow and cumbersome?  Heck no!  So app developers work hard to help find ways to speed up and deliver the best possible user experience possible.

In the early days of mobile app performance, I wrote a book that details many of the ways Android developers can test for performance.  Many of these tools are gone, but newer and better tools have replaced them.  

Understanding Slowness

Speaking to Android developers today, I am still surprised about how little is known about what causes application slowness.  App developers understand their code and work to optimize the lines of code in front of them. And this is awesome - the certainly find many of the issues that lead to crashes.

Network Traffic

Even so, there are dark corners of mobile applications that are hard to test, configure and understand how they work.  One of these is what data is transmitted in the network calls and traffic patterns made by the application.  

Sometimes these issues are hidden by testing scenarios  -  if you are building a mobile app, you probably have great cellular and Wi-Fi coverage, so you don;t encounter slow interactions. Despite the near ubiquity of 5G in major cities, there are large swaths of the US and the world with low coverage.. Or perhaps congestion - hundreds of people connected to the same cell tower can also lead to very poor application performance.

Solutions to Network Performance

At DownWing tech, we have seen it all.  The weirdest was definitely a website automatically downloaded a 300MB Linux install file to every user.  We’ve seen 4K videos downloaded - but hidden from view, images that were 5MB instead of 5 KB, and other egregious mistakes that slow down that application, kill the phone’s battery and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

WIth the rise of video, we have devised tricks to better and more efficiently deliver video over mobile networks, while still taking carrier throttling to 720p into account.

If your application team struggles with slow mobile experiences - maybe we can help out.  Feel free to reach out for a consultation.