The most crucial characteristics of a mobile application are its dependability, functionality, and user-friendliness. The user’s initial interaction with your app is the most critical factor. When presented with a sluggish, unresponsive application, most consumers quickly uninstall it. Therefore, the performance of a mobile app should be quick, exhaustive, and limited to information directly related to the app’s function. That’s why performance testing for a mobile app is essential.
The importance of mobile app performance
Markets are more competitive than ever. The corporate world is full of options. Users who visit the app only to find that it takes too long to load will go on to the next app on the store’s recommended list. If your mobile app is sluggish and unresponsive, your customers will quickly uninstall it. Slowness, bugs, and crashes lead 8- 10% of your app’s users to give it a bad rating or review. Remember it while doing mobile app performance testing.
How to Improve app performance
Reduce App size
Reduce the size of the application. Both Google and Apple recommend several techniques for reducing app sizes to improve the performance of mobile applications. App Bundles are one way you may enhance your mobile application’s performance. When publishing your app, Google advocates using Android App Bundles instead of a universal APK. Find unnecessary functionalities in your app for the app’s essential operation. Please place them in a distinct folder that can be downloaded or accessed as needed.
Optimize Network
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a proven method for enhancing the performance of mobile applications. APIs enable a mobile application to interact with and obtain information from other applications. A CDN plays a crucial role in shortening this journey and boosting the speed of your mobile application. Using a CDN expedites data transfer across APIs and makes the entire process more dependable, greatly enhancing your mobile application’s speed.
Optimize image and video
There are several ways to accelerate the functionality of your application. First, image size can be reduced by techniques like compression while the image’s resolution remains unchanged. Image resizing lets you fit photos into your mobile app without using as much data as you would if you displayed the entire original image. The app’s loading time will increase, proportional to the size of the image. The same rules apply to moving pictures. Finally, caching saves media from the internet to local storage. Once stored locally, the mobile app may access data directly from memory rather than constantly downloading it from the cloud.
Optimize offline mode
An offline mode generates a buffer for the secure storage of your data in the event of an unexpected loss of network connection. The data you utilized would be lost if you were disconnected without an offline mode. With offline mode, you can preserve your data and return to it once the user is connected again. An offline mode ensures data security, dependability, and user convenience.
Optimize Screen size
Any mistakes or defects in layouts or screen size will hinder the app’s performance and speed. Instead of creating additional data templates for your application to load, reuse existing ones. Being resourceful implies carrying a lesser weight.
Improve Memory usage
Memory leaks occur when unneeded items occupy extra memory space, and the garbage collector cannot liberate that space. The issue is that references to these unnecessary objects still exist. Suppose, for instance, that our code has a relation to a useless Activity. In this case, we are holding this activity’s layouts, views, and everything else it contains. Always deregister events and handlers when your app has finished using them or await the on-destroy function, the final call you get before your activity or component is destroyed, to prevent and fix memory leaks. Also, avoid storing Context Objects within your classes. Some programmers tend to pass Context from activities to classes, saving it in a private variable. Instead, utilize the Android profiler or LeakCanary to identify memory leaks inside your application.
Minimize Launch time
With the expansion of technology, people are becoming more impatient. Likewise, the app’s launch time must be accelerated for the same reason. For a quicker launch, crosscheck and eliminate unnecessary elements that are optional for the initial launch. You may also leverage lazy initialization. In this method, things are delayed until they are needed.
Avoid Blocking the main thread.
There are two primary sorts of threads to be aware of. The main line, often known as the UI thread, is responsible for rendering the UI and managing user interaction inside an application. The second sort of thread is the background thread, which may manage lengthy processes while the main line contains UI changes. The UI thread will constantly refresh the user interface every 16 milliseconds for optimal efficiency and usability. To account for this, you should consistently execute lengthy operations in the UI thread; otherwise, you will miss the 16ms restriction, and your app will appear sluggish and unresponsive. Instead, it would help if you always ran lengthy processes in background threads.
Work on App loading time
When pre-loading or pre-fetching data, the vital information you’re seeking loads faster than other app assets, enhancing the loading speed of relevant information. All of the app’s data loaded at once will only slow it down. Instead of working with enormous data chunks at once, you might use split-up assemblies to divide the data into conveniently retrievable pieces. After all, you only need some of the app’s data at a time, only the essentials.
Conclusion
Even if the mobile app market is flooded with alternatives for virtually any need or want, you may still produce a fantastic product. So constantly update your app performance. But doing manual performance testing will not make it feasible. So instead, switch to automated performance testing. Try a mobile app performance testing tool like headSpin for automation. Using the HeadSpin Global Device Infrastructure, you can get accurate, up-to-date information on all the devices, networks, and locations in question.
