How to Optimize Your Mobile App Performance

Mobile App Development

Mobile app performance is a vital ingredient of app success in real life because, in the recent era, technological innovations are hardly fascinating users that, excellent user experiences can do. Therefore, focusing on app performance can yield better UX. It ultimately leads app owners and app developers to think of optimization of app for performance metrics

• By right from the beginning of app development process
• By testing issues arising during the app development
• By recognizing at post-development stage i.e. in the field

In the previous post, we have a look at the app performance metrics and tools to recognize & solve them. Now, we may try to focus on app optimization with performance in mind.

Mobile Constraints

We know mobile constraints against big sister devices such as laptops and desktops.

Form Factors

The first is the form factor that we have to manage for tiny smartphones to large size tablets for consistent user experiences. The next one is limited CPU power, and fortunately, technological advancements are adding more and more capacities with the pace of time, but developers cannot know whether users have updated their devices or not.

Connectivity

It is connectivity with external world or services including the Internet, location-based services, cloud services, Bluetooth related applications, sensors, wearable device connectivity, and many others are determining app performance greatly. Again we cannot assume that our users have what sorts of connectivity available. How far it remains consistent due to their mobility. Therefore, your app can fail at any point right from loading at the starting point of establishing connections with various services and cloud databases during intricate operations. Thus, if your app fails to deliver good performance, you are likely spoiling brand image, missing a good download, app retention, and app engagement. Thus, potential sale and ads revenue too.

Touch Experiences

Mobile touch gestures for operating mobile app are quite different from pointing device experiences. Therefore, it requires some special treatment in layout, designing, and in UI elements too.

How to Overcome Mobile Constraints for Mobile App Performance Optimization

Before doing anything on optimization tasks during Mobile Application Development process, we must have accurate ideas that what is going on at frontend and backend as well. Today we have mobile application performance monitoring tools, which are capable of delivering actual insights and measurements for performance metrics.

Optimize for Fast Loading

The majority of mobile apps are install basis and with local storage of app data. Therefore, connectivity issues are affecting at the initial stage when user download the app from the app stores. Another scenario is web services or cloud services where connectivity issues are playing significant roles. Unfortunately, due to mobile constraints, local storage of data is a less likely preference and cloud storage are gaining ground, so developers have to consider data exchanges issues too. Moreover, we highly depend on web services for various e-commerce activities including payment processes, product-catalog loading, various real-time notifications, and chats. Social media apps are demanding constant updates from the social network sites or their servers and make web connectivity, as an essentiality for mobile apps of all kinds of social media integrations. Therefore, mobile app designers and programmers have to optimize for local exchanges as well as external ones too. Let’s see how we can do it.

Content Optimization for Mobile App Performance

Today most of the mobile applications have multimedia content besides graphics for UI and texts. Images are predominantly used to bring visual communication, so image optimization is an immediate need. We can optimize images prior to integrating them into app source code or give them links or calls to load. Fortunately, we have myriads of image optimization tools available with advancements to reduce image memory size without reducing resolutions or image quality at all. Another way is to implement image optimization software working at the code level and process on the image directly in computing memory. The same is possible for audio and video content too. For client-side installed mobile applications, you have to recognize mobile devices before loading content during installation of the app or in real-time loading. For instance, for the smartphone version of apps, different devices are coming with various screen resolutions, so loading unnecessary content not makes much sense. Thus, when devices with smaller resolutions need lower resolution content, why should you load higher resolution content there? Moreover, for graphical resources, we can take graceful degradation approaches by reducing nice-to-have effects on graphical components. For instance, we can remove anti-aliasing effects, avoid complex texture mapping, and remove filter effects on the image parts of app graphics. In order to identify such issues, you need to take help of painting algorithms and test all such resources for low power mobile devices.

Caching for Mobile App Performance

Well, after the issue of image optimization, Mobile Application Developer can focus on image loading, which is taking place frequently for certain images and some multimedia content including textual content too. Thus, client-side cache system or local storage using LocalStorage API can help us a lot for the content residing on the web or Cloud. Of course, native mobile apps with local content can save you from such daunting exercises, but web apps or native mobile apps with intense use of web services need to follow all.

Algorithm Optimization

You can do it by running an application inside the code profiler so you may have ideas regarding the bottlenecks in it. Moreover, try to optimize source code of your app, particularly for JavaScript-like scripting languages used intensively along with the native code. It is better, you prefer Media Query, Angular JS, and Node JS like the latest, yet innocent technologies. Thus, you can achieve the best results for your app performance, as you do with JavaScript.

Data Exchange Optimization

Technically, data exchanges with web services are deteriorating app performance due to plenty of mobile connectivity issues. Therefore, if you have sizable data for your database storage, prefer local data storage. It is better you aggregate inbound and outbound requests for the smaller numbers of network calls. Moreover, you can save time and battery drainage too. Try to optimize database, CPU consumption, and memory usages by various ways.

UI Optimization

As we know that, we mobile landscape is acutely suffering from fragmentation issues due to variations in form factors of mobile devices. Therefore, designing responsive layout for all mobile applications are a good way to address it beautifully. Try lean and grid based layouts with responsive coding. You can use smart UI elements to avoid clutter in UI as well as provide intelligent clues to the users to use minimum UI elements for maximum purposes.

Optimized for Touch Experiences

Rapid interactions are the primary aim of mobile app performance optimization. Therefore, we need to think in a direction where users can accomplish their tasks as fast as possible, and touch gestures are some sorts of obstacles on the road. Unclutter UI elements and provide enough spaces in between them smoothen the touch interactions on tiny screens with big sized fingers and thumbs. Reduce UI loads by providing scrolling opportunities by lengthening page/UI length vertically. Try to minimize typing needs, as typing on mobiles is daunting and you can do it by providing feasible options to select instead of type in the field. Use of smart icons can help you in this regard too.

Tools that Help in Mobile App Performance Optimization

Up till now, we have hints for performance optimization, but without recognizing the performance issues with deeper insights into app behavior, user behavior on the app, and app use data, how can we shoot the real trouble in real meaning? Therefore, we have to dive in the app usage analytics and collect or obtain whatever KIP we need to measure for the unique needs of our mobile applications. Fortunately, we have a number of in-app analytics tools available in the market either with affordable rates or free of any charge. Let’s have a look at the precious in-app usage analytics.

Flurry Analytics

Flurry has earned a big prestige among the in-app analytics tools with complete sets of required tools and custom dashboard formation abilities. You can fine variety of in-app information to go ahead for app performance optimization. For instance, you can accumulate various info such as:

• Usage info: for active users, sessions, usage frequency, user retention, and so on
• Audience info: for user interests, user persona, user demography, and so on
• Technical info: for errors, devices, carriers, and so on
• Events info: for defined events, user paths, funnels, and so on

Universal Analytics by Google

It is a pretty big deal for cross-platform apps including native apps. It can give you in-app analytics reports into four distinguish categories such as:

• Acquisitions
• Users (app audience)
• Engagement (app behavior)
• Conversion

Mixpanel

It is an event-based in-app analytics tool. It is easy to create funnels with it. It allows in-depth analysis with nice UI. It lets you tie mobile to the web and run cohort analysis. Such other analytics tools are:

• Apple App Analytics
• Facebook analytics
• Amplitude
• Twitter (Answers on Fabric)
• Countly
• Appsee
• Localytics
• Apsalar or ApScience

Conclusion

Managing the mobile app performance is altogether different from traditional web application performance and require different sets of expertise, tools, and experiences from the app developers. Therefore, when you think of mobile app performance optimization, consider seasoned and specifically trained mobile app developer team for such herculean tasks and Mobile App Development Team at Addon Solutions is highly dependable and economically feasible to hire.