Best Mobile APM Solutions

Below is a list of best practices to follow when monitoring your mobile application:

• Monitor your app’s launch time and resume time: Measure both the launch time and the resume time for an application already running in the background to see how they impact user experience.
  
  
• Monitor UI response time: Measure UI response time the way it's experienced by users using different platforms and operating systems. It is important to focus on issues that affect the most users and have the highest business impact.
  
  
• Monitor errors and crashes: Crashes impact your organization’s business. Log the user actions and HTTP errors that cause errors and the number of affected users.

Here are several tips for improving the performance of your mobile app:

• Load APIs from a CDN: Using a content delivery network (CDN) accelerates the loading of APIs. A CDN uses servers throughout the world to speed up API interaction. By using an edge server that is located close to the user, payload, latency, size, and round-trip time is reduced.
  
  
• Optimize application images: Compress and cache images to reduce load time. Compressing images reduces their size and allows you to quickly load images on your app, sparing the extra bandwidth that would be required to show the originally sized image. Caching downloaded images from the network to the device’s memory speeds up application load time, since the mobile app will no longer be required to load them from the external network each time, but rather from its own internal memory.
  

• Load data as you use it: Break down your application’s data into easily retrievable information and load only partial data when the application is launched. When preloading or pre-fetching data, the important information loads before the other assets on the app.

Mobile APM software fills the need for end-to-end visibility into production mobile apps. It delivers device analytics, crash reporting, and network requests. These features help companies isolate and trace issues to their source - whether it’s the application code, network, server, or device.

When choosing a mobile APM solution, here are some features to look out for:

• Application performance monitoring: Real-time monitoring of all end-user experiences and interactions. This includes applications, networks, and the entire cloud ecosystem.
  
  
• Analytics: Understand the behavioral patterns of an application’s users and proactively detect mobile app incidents by severity, affected users, and geography, to prioritize response.
  
  
• Device performance monitoring (DPM): Gain insights into performance and health of mobile devices and automatically resolve issues that arise.
  
  
• Logging and reporting: Filter crashes with analytics based on app version, OS version, device type, and more to immediately reproduce crashes and user actions.
  
  
• Benchmarking: Compare an organization's digital experience to others in the market by leveraging benchmark data from millions of devices.

Mobile APM solutions optimize app performance by continuously monitoring application behavior and infrastructure. They provide insights into application crashes, slow load times, and other critical issues. By using real-time data, you can detect performance bottlenecks and possible failure points, allowing you to resolve issues quickly and improve overall user experience.

Important metrics in Mobile APM include app launch time, crash rates, network requests, and user interactions. These metrics help you understand app responsiveness and stability. Detailed analysis of these metrics allows you to pinpoint specific issues affecting user experience and address them effectively, ensuring the app runs smoothly across different devices and environments.

By using Mobile APM, you can ensure a seamless user experience through proactive monitoring and quick issue resolutions. It helps identify problematic areas within the application, such as functionality errors or network delays, allowing you to act promptly. This ensures users face minimal disruption, enhancing satisfaction and retention.

Implementing Mobile APM can be challenging due to the diverse range of devices and operating systems. Multiple metrics need monitoring across various environments, requiring proper configuration and analysis. Additionally, integrating APM tools with existing systems requires planning to ensure a seamless setup that accurately reflects app performance data.

Crash analytics is a vital aspect of Mobile APM as it provides in-depth insights into the causes and frequency of app crashes. Understanding these aspects helps you prioritize fixes based on the impact on users. By analyzing this data, you can enhance app reliability and retain user trust by ensuring an application that performs consistently overtime.