Monitoring Mobile App Performance

 

Mobile Device App Testing
Source: Pixabay

With the myriad of apps cluttering our smartphone screens nowadays, it has become all the more important to optimize app performance. While going through your daily routine, you certainly don’t want useful apps hanging up or worse still, crashing abysmally.

 

In this post, you’ll know how app monitoring performance works so that you can get the best out of your smartphone software.

 

What is application performance management? 10 APM features that we can tick right off our fingers are:

  • Troubleshooting of disruption of frequent speed and uptime
  • Monitoring of the speed at which transactions are performed by end-users and systems
  • Use of a single integrated suite of software tools
  • Load-testing
  • Synthetic monitoring
  • Real-use monitoring
  • Root-cause analysis
  • Web-performance monitoring, to gauge app speed and uptime
  • An end-to-end overview of bottlenecks
  • Review of service interruptions

APM is integrated through the lifecycle of an application including the pre-deployment and post-deployment stages. It is therefore important for developers, testers, and business teams.
A slow load can be prevalent due to a host of issues related to APIs, servers, or browsers. APM techniques are what help pinpoint the actual problem.

 

Basic availability monitoring involves testing IP protocols and network services, but a user needs to establish some optimal performance thresholds and real-time alerts to monitor and manage both speed and reliability.

 

Tips for monitoring app performance

Tips for monitoring app performance
Source: Pixabay

Performance monitoring must take into account certain things in order to optimize user experience. These include measuring from the user’s point of view, i.e. performance, stability, and resource utilization in real time the way the user perceives them.

 

The context is crucial too. It’s important to determine how many users were affected by a slowdown, and what action on a specific operating device prompted the disruption. To truly experience a ‘mobile moment,’ you should follow these tips for monitoring your app performance:

 

Measure Frame rendering time

Only measuring network time doesn’t cut it out for users, who are interested in when the network resumes as well as when it responds.

Measuring response time by the device or operating system allows the product manager to focus on one platform at a time, respond to performance issues, and deploy resources accordingly.

 

Measure battery usage

It’s crucial to measure the battery consumption of your mobile app, along with data plan impact and memory usage. If the app is responsible for draining your battery, you should bring it in line with best practices.

Frequent updates can also be minimized so that user satisfaction can be increased.

 

Measure cell data consumption

Recent studies by Dimensional Research have shown that 20% of respondents stopped using apps that were heavy on data usage. This indicates that you should measure the consumption by app version, the total number of users, KBs of data consumed per minute, the amount of data being transferred per hit, and the percentage of data being consumed per hit.

 

Measure errors

HTTP errors from certain URLs need to be captured. This will help track the number of users who received an error, the actions that resulted in it, number of users with errors on app launch, the percentage of actions that led to at least one error, and the app version.

pCloudy ENGAGE

As per our initiative to engage with enthusiastic and bright-minded app testing professionals in the industry, we at pCloudy held a user meet-up, pCloudy ENGAGE, Mumbai edition for our enterprise customers in Mumbai on 2nd of August, 2018. With so much of hard-work and planning put behind the event, it turned out to be a big success where we could discuss about some insightful experiences and the best practices in mobile app testing space from our customers.

 

pCloudy Engage

 

In our pursuit to look for innovative ideas to solve software quality and testing related challenges of mobile applications pCloudy continues to focus on three major themes at pCloudy ENGAGE, Mumbai edition.

 

Focus on USERS: First hand feedback from the customers is unmatched and that has always been on our priority list. We got many insightful suggestions and feedback to make our product robust and futuristic which made the event even more productive.

 

Focus on GROWTH: The event was all about mutual help to grow each other’s businesses. We brought forth some of the hidden gem features of pCloudy that can change the game for enterprise mobility. In return we received invaluable feedback and suggestions to better our product.

 

Focus on FUTURISTIC FEATURES: We have always endeavored to be the frontrunner in the market. With every update release we try to strengthen the platform in line with intelligence to meet the market demands and accelerate delivery.

 

pCloudy Customers

 

The keynote speaker for the day was Mr. Avinash Tiwari, our co-founder who spoke about the fast-paced growth in the industry and the evolution of mobile app testing. He also spoke about how Continuous testing and delivery has accelerated the delivery of apps from months to days and has also improved the quality of apps. But, he posed a serious question – seeing the pace of growth and advancement in the app test industry what is going to maintain the quality @speed beyond continuous testing. The future of app testing! Features like – bot test, predictive analytics, parallelism in manual app tests and crowd tests can change the game of next gen app testing.

 

Avinash Tiwari - Keynote Speaker

 

Next was the turn of presenting the hidden gems of pCloudy – the features that can level up the app testing for enterprise mobility?

  • The first hidden gem was the introduction of an important capability for cross browser testing which can make web app testing a breeze. Heeding to the growing demands of our users, we have introduced the Launch and Upload browser feature for our Android users which will give him the freedom to choose the version and the browser that he wants to use. This is going to save their testing time and efforts to a great extent and also give better results for their cross browser test.
  •  

    Giriraj

     

  • Next hidden gem showed how you can turn your remote device in-hand USB device and work wonders like inspecting object elements using Appium inspector. You can run ADB commands or get debug info like an in-hand device connected and it can run on any open source tool without any integration required.
  •  

    Nilesh Tarale

     

  • The last but of course the game changer hidden gem, Follow Me was introduced which can speed up the manual app test exponentially. It is a first of its kind solution where you can test your app in synchronous mode on one device and it can be replicated on multiple other devices saving your app test time by 50%.

 

The hidden gems were well appreciated by our user community and some of our customers came forward to share their insights and experiences with all of us.

 

Special thanks to Anil Dashrath Sonone, Project Manager from Infosys, and Karthikeyan M, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer from AQM Technologies for sharing wonderful insights and experiences as a first hand customer with all of us.

 

Anil Dasharath
Giriraj, our VP Sales felicitating Anil Dasharath Sonone from Infosys

 

Karthikeyan M
Giriraj, our VP Sales felicitating Karthikeyan M from AQM Technologies

 

The event ended on positive note followed by cocktail and dinner.

 

Having Dinner
Having Cocktail

 

Thanks a lot to you all for making it worth it! We are coming up soon with another edition of pCloudy ENGAGE in your city. Stay tuned!

We are committed to keep you ahead of others: pCloudy is one of the fastest to release support of Android 9 Pie devices on cloud

 

pCloudy is happy to announce that we have released our support for Android 9 Pie on our cloud. pCloudy customers can use the Android devices with Android 9 Pie for testing their applications manually or through automation.

 

Android 9 Pie

 

We request all our users to start testing their apps on Android 9 Pie and share their suggestions and feedback for improvement.

Happy Testing!!!