A few releases ago, we announced that Instana Mobile Monitoring had been enhanced to support key performance metrics such as app start/launch time, ANRs/app freezes, and low memory errors. In the previous blog post, we explained why these metrics are crucial for understanding how your app behaves under real-world conditions—and how they help uncover performance bottlenecks that impact user experience.
At the time, we also mentioned that additional performance metrics were on the way. In this post, we’re excited to introduce two important additions: screen rendering times and excessive background network usage (Android only). These metrics help mobile teams detect silent degradations that may not cause crashes but still negatively affect user perception, device efficiency, and app reputation.
Screen Rendering Times: The perception of Speed
When users interact with your app—navigating between screens, tapping buttons, or opening menus—they expect smooth, immediate feedback. Any delay in how quickly a screen appears or becomes interactive can make the app feel slow, even if no errors occur.
Screen rendering times measure how long it takes for a screen or view to fully render and become interactive after a user action. This is a key factor in how users perceive your app’s performance.
From the user’s point of view, these delays often show up as:
- Sluggish transitions
- Janky or dropped frames
- Screens that momentarily appear blank or unresponsive
These issues are frequently caused by complex UI layouts, heavy main-thread processing, or inefficient rendering paths. While subtle, they can significantly degrade the overall experience—especially on mid- to low-end devices.
Tracking this metric allows teams to:
- Identify consistently slow screens across devices and versions
- Optimize layout hierarchies and defer non-critical rendering
- Improve responsiveness and ensure smooth, fluid interactions
Delivering a fast-feeling, responsive UI is essential to user satisfaction—and screen rendering time provides the visibility needed to support that goal.
Excessive Background Network Usage: Performance Beyond the Foreground (Android only)
Great app performance doesn’t stop when users put your app in the background. If your app continues to send or receive data while not actively being used, it can silently degrade the experience—draining battery, consuming mobile data, and triggering OS-level restrictions.
Excessive background network usage occurs when an app repeatedly wakes the CPU and radio to perform network operations while running in the background.
From the user’s perspective, this often results in:
- Faster-than-expected battery drain
- Unexpected data usage
- System warnings or reduced background privileges for your app
According to Android Vitals, background network usage is considered excessive when an app sends and receives more than 50 MB of data per user per day while in the background. Reaching this threshold can lead to performance degradation, app limitations, or even policy enforcement by app marketplaces.
By monitoring background network usage, mobile teams can:
- Detect features or services generating high background traffic
- Optimize background sync strategies and payload sizes
- Ensure compliance with platform guidelines and user expectations
Improving efficiency in the background helps create apps that are not only responsive when in use, but also resource-conscious when they’re not.
How Instana Supports These New Metrics
Starting with Instana version 299 and SDK versions Android v6.2.3 and iOS v1.9.2, Instana supports the collection and analysis of screen rendering times and excessive background network usage (Android only). These additions extend Instana’s observability capabilities into areas of perceived performance and hidden inefficiencies.
These metrics are fully integrated into Instana’s performance dashboards, allowing you to track their evolution over time, apply filters to compare performance across different release versions, countries or any other predefined metadata, making it easier to identify trends and issues.
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