In 2018, 52.2% of all worldwide online traffic was generated through mobile phones (Statista, 2018). Besides indicating an overwhelming adoption of mobile technology, what does this data mean for your business? It means that proactively designing, developing, and performance testing mobile apps is more important than ever.
What are the consequences of failing to performance test mobile apps?
Neglecting to properly engineer for performance in mobile application deployment is a recipe for having frustrated customers. Without accurately predicting how applications and network services will perform for your end users before going live, some portion of your deployment will likely fail. By proactively performance testing mobile apps with traffic generator tools, developers can troubleshoot any potential issues prior to roll-out, to avoid costly fixes, or worse, a damaged reputation. It seems, however, that many companies are unprepared to establish, validate, and predict mobile application performance.
How could failure impact your business costs?
There are two types of cost to consider when examining the business impact of a poorly performing mobile application – remediation costs and business costs. Calculating remediation cost is easy; you just need to understand how many resources are required to troubleshoot and resolve a problem, how long it takes those resources to resolve the problem, and what is the hourly cost of those resources. With this information, you begin to understand how much a failure costs.
You also need to take into consideration how the application affects your business and end users. How does your company brand relate to the app? What is the impact of bad reviews? Good reviews? The Android market and the Apple AppStore offer immediate feedback – positive and negative. These reviews can – and do – make or break an application’s success.
But you also must ask yourself: how do performance degradations affect revenue? Are you conducting eCommerce through your app? If so, how many sales have been interrupted or lost? Or how often are consumers choosing a competitor over you in search of a better experience. Do you know what it costs your business to lose a customer? To retain them? What is the lifetime customer value? What does it cost to acquire a new customer? Answering these critical questions could be the key to unlocking the true cost of failure for your mobile application.
How can you avoid or reduce the possibility of app performance failures?
True cost avoidance and failure reduction or elimination comes from proactively designing, developing, and testing for mobile application performance. Mobile app performance is inherently subject to the conditions of the network its running on – whether it’s Wi-Fi, 3G LTE, or the up and coming 5G. That’s why it is imperative to rigorously test your application against the same conditions it faces on real-world networks during pre-production.
By introducing network emulators and network delay simulators to simulate network impairments like latency and congestion, developers can more accurately predict how their mobile application will perform when it goes live. Catching and troubleshooting problems before they reach your end user not only saves money on post-production fixes, it saves your brand reputation and the long-term financial impact that comes from losing your consumers’ confidence.
