Why Is Mobile App Performance Optimization Important?

Today almost no one would tolerate the inconvenient and bulky smartphone applications. People expect to be able to enjoy all the advantages of the smartphone technologies with the speed of light. As per expert application developers, if a website or mobile app is inconvenient and slow, users immediately switch to competitor’s solution. Hence, developers need mobile app performance optimization to enhance the effectiveness of the application. The optimized application always provides desired user experience and hence improves the productivity of application.

Mobile App Performance Testing

Performance testing is the main method of measuring application performance even at the development stage. It is very important to determine whether the requirements of modern mobile users are met by the application even before released to market. Otherwise, the cost of the program completion may exceed the cost of testing. Many companies neglect this process altogether, referring to the cost overrun.

Performance testing involves different types of tests. These tests ensure the performance assessment and management in terms of stability, resource consumption, security and other attributes of the application. It generally improves the application quality under different scenarios and workloads. Performance testing help to find out potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the application.

Types Of Tests Included In Performance Testing

Depending on the characteristics that developers want to test, performance tests are divided into the following types:

Load Testing:

Load testing checks the response time of the application with different types of requests. This testing verifies whether the application behaves properly according to normal hardware and software resources.

Stress Testing:

In this testing, the application is tested under load and exceeding the usual load. Stress testing helps to procure the data on real application performance boundaries. For example, the program's ability to handle exceptions, its stability and sustainability are explored. The significant load increase is exactly the main difference between load testing and stress testing.

Stability Testing:

It examines the performance of the application after prolonged usage under normal application loads.

Volume Testing:

Volume testing is conducted with the increase, not in loads or the run time, but in the size of the data, stored and used by the application.

The main purpose of performance testing is to make sure that the application works acceptable under certain performance requirements. These requirements involve access by a large number of users, the elimination of important infrastructure elements, such as a backend server, and others. Benchmark can be done manually or with the use of mobile application testing tools.

How To Improve Mobile Application Speed?

There are a number of ways how to optimize application performance and make it run faster. We will share the most fundamental ones.

Qualitative UX Design:

App development companies should not skimp on hiring UX-designers and improving their skills. A good professional will not only create great application UX-designs but also advise on ways of application performance optimization.

Profiler Usage:

Performance profiler is a service that executes the mobile app performance monitoring and helps to quickly establish its "bottlenecks". There is universal (New Relic), platform oriented (Android Studio Performance Profiling Tools for Android, Xcode for iOS), language oriented (Xamarin Profiler for C#) and framework oriented (Unity Profiler for Unity 3D) instruments.

Careful Design Of Application Architecture:

To improve the development speed it is worth adhering to the three-tier structure of the application:

Data- Business Logic- Representation:

Each component’s code should be responsible only for its part of processing and interact with other components through interfaces.

Caching:

Mobile devices do not always have a stable Internet connection to access the cloud storage so often there is a need for offline data caching. In addition, caching is used to speed the application. For example, if the same data is displayed on different screens content layout, cache get saved in RAM to fetch data quickly. Same principles may be applied to native, non-native or cross-platform apps. A sub-type of caching is swapping which can be used to reduce the memory usage.

Custom Adaptation:

Automatic computational adaptation implemented internally by the system but developers can also use custom adaptation strategies to use the business logic of mobile applications. A typically customized adaptation includes the use of CPU cores load balancing, data compression, simplification in network information exchange, server selection algorithms, and other performance tuning solutions. At the same time, such adaptation must be selective at the level of applications or users.

Conclusion

Mobile app performance optimization significantly improves the quality of the application and decreases the load time by seconds. Thus it is important to include application performance testing and optimization as essential part of development process.