As mobile applications become more complex and user expectations increase, ensuring that your app performs well under all conditions is more important than ever. For mobile developers, this means focusing on critical performance metrics that directly affect user experience and app stability. Among these metrics, app start/launch time, ANRs (Application Not Responding)/App freeze errors and low memory errors are some of the most crucial for monitoring the health of a mobile app. In this post, we’ll explore why tracking these metrics is essential for maintaining high app performance and user satisfaction and what’s the support provided by Instana.
App start/launch time: The First Impression
The app start/launch time is one of the first performance metrics users experience when launching a mobile app. It is the amount of time it takes for the app to load and become interactive from the moment the user taps the app icon. The importance of app start time cannot be overstated: if it’s too long, users may abandon the app before it even loads, leading to poor retention rates and negative user feedback.
From a technical perspective, a slow app start can be caused by various factors, such as heavy initialisation processes, inefficient background tasks, or unoptimised resource loading. By monitoring app start time, developers can identify performance bottlenecks and take action to optimise startup performance. Whether it’s optimising code, reducing the number of dependencies loaded on launch, or deferring non-essential tasks, tracking this metric allows for informed decision-making aimed at improving the first impression users have of your app.
ANR (Application Not Responding)/App Freeze: Tackling User Interruptions
ANRs/App freeze are another critical performance metric to monitor. An ANR/App freeze occurs when an app becomes unresponsive for a prolonged period, typically due to the main thread being blocked by heavy computations, database queries, or network calls. If the app doesn't respond within a specified timeout (usually 5 seconds), the system shows a dialog indicating that the application is not responding, which can frustrate users and lead to app uninstalls.
Tracking ANR/app freeze errors helps developers identify specific parts of the app’s code or operations that cause these interruptions. Common culprits for these kinds of errors include blocking the UI thread with long-running tasks or performing heavy operations (like I/O or network calls) without proper background threading. By monitoring ANRs, developers can ensure that the app remains responsive by offloading tasks to background threads, optimizing long-running operations, or improving responsiveness with appropriate timeouts.
Low memory: Preventing Crashes and Instability
Low memory errors occur when the app exceeds the available memory limits on the device, leading to crashes or unexpected behavior. These errors are particularly common in mobile environments, where devices have limited resources compared to desktop or server systems. When an app runs out of memory, the operating system terminates it to protect the system’s stability, resulting in a poor user experience.
Monitoring Low memory errors is essential for understanding how your app behaves on low memory and identifying memory leaks or excessive memory consumption. Mobile devices, especially those with lower RAM capacities, are particularly susceptible to low memory events. By tracking memory usage and low memory events, developers can pinpoint areas of the app that are consuming too much memory, optimise resource allocation, and detect memory leaks.
Why monitoring these metrics is crucial
Monitoring app start/launch time, ANRs/app freezes and Low memory errors provides developers with critical insights into the areas that directly impact the performance, reliability, and user experience of a mobile app. These metrics give you a clear view of how your app behaves under different conditions, allowing you to identify and address performance bottlenecks.
Real-time monitoring of these critical performance metrics gives you an accurate picture of how your app performs under the conditions that matter most: real user environments. By identifying issues like slow start times, unresponsiveness, and memory problems early and continuously, you can make informed, data-driven decisions that improve app reliability, retain users, and ultimately deliver a better user experience.
Instana support for mobile apps performance metrics
With Instana release 292 and the Android v6.2.0/iOS v1.9.0 sdks, we are introducing support for app start/launch time, ANRs/app freezes, and low memory errors. These metrics are now seamlessly integrated with the previously existing capabilities, such as crash analysis and HTTP request backend correlation. This provides a comprehensive view of your mobile app’s performance from the frontend to the backend, enabling you to monitor and optimise every aspect of the user experience.
Instana presents these metrics in an aggregate view, allowing you to track their evolution over time. You can also apply filters to compare performance across different release versions, countries or any other predefined metadata, making it easier to identify trends and issues.
Additionally, these metrics are available in the detailed session view, giving you the full context when troubleshooting and resolving issues.
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