It’s pretty simple logic when you think about it. If there’s apps and manufacturers out there developing ways to disinfect and clean up your Android phone, then there’s obviously some apps out there that are misbehaving.
Just this week, Google started pushing to get this fixed, with a $1,000 bounty for bugs that are spotted in apps withing the Google Play store. Sure, Google already have automatic systems which will check through apps in the store, but the human element has now been introduced too.
Working with HackerOne, flaws and problems within apps can be detected, reported and those highlighting the problem can be rewarded.
It’s not just malware and virus-infected apps that are on the hit-list either, because there’s still a large amount of frankly bad apps out there. They’re designed badly and they perform terribly. For the app developers, this is where they need to act. Performance, quality and usability are critical and a key part of making a popular app. According to a recent research report, over 65% of U.S. respondents agreed that their expectations of mobile app performance are increasing over time. As a business, if you’re relying on that app to lift you make you successful, it could well drag your brand through the mud instead.
Here’s a look at just five simple ways of fixing that.
Monitor and Measure Performance
Adding the full functionality, throwing in the kitchen sink, can mean that you’re adding in performance and availability issues without even thinking about it. It’s important to stay ahead of possible problems by testing and constantly monitoring how your mobile app is performing. You can then use this data to compare changes with your key performance metrics.
Having an effective Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool helps you get important insights that you’ll need to improve your app performance: read much more here about how APM solutions can help you monitor mobile app performance.
Simplify and Streamline Your Mobile App
Yeah, maybe the entire kitchen sink isn’t actually needed. Simplicity is what you should go for when developing a business app. Admit that cutting down your feature list and focusing only on the core business application features. Even the biggest apps do this – as an example, the PayPal app doesn’t have all the functionality of the website, but that’s sometimes because the website and a laptop is the better way to perform certain tasks.
Again, having that application performance monitoring means that you can easily point out features that are used by just a small percentage of users, and you can cut them out to help simplify the app and improve overall performance.
Understand User Expectations
If your customer is unhappy and their expectations haven’t been met, they’re going to simply stop using your app. Once they stop, sooner or later, they’ll uninstall, and you’ll never see them again. So ask yourself. Do you know what your users want? Are new features strictly necessary?
There is no doubt that improving user experience comes with lots of great benefits for your customer and then for your business too. Be sure to check and analyze the data you’ve collected about user experiences, get feedback and fine out if you’re delivering quality and the right features that are actually needed.
Improve App Responsiveness
Speed. It’s all about speed. Although most smartphones are super powerful now, we shouldn’t just lean on all those processors for the sake of it. A hungry, resource heavy app which constantly sits in the background is not doing to be the app people want. An app that opens and loads different features fast will obviously improve user satisfaction and will mean that people come back to use it.
When launching new features, doing upgrades or rolling out changes in your mobile application, make sure that you test how each of these new changes affect the functionality, performance and speed of your app. Test the deployment, get feedback if you can. Get some user acceptance testing.
Get the Right Tools
Developing an app using an online app-maker can sometimes work for smaller companies. But for the majority, it’s important to check that you’re using the right kit out of the box. Getting a single APM solution that can handle your mobile app performance monitoring needs, as well as other performance needs of your business, is a great helper. You have to select the right tools if you want effective APM for your mobile apps.