How to Improve The Performance of Your Mobile App 

According to research, mobile apps have caused issues for more than 50% of all users. It's easy to fall into the trap of solely concentrating on the user experience, design, and app advertising when it comes to designing a mobile app. The performance of your mobile app, however, is what keeps users away the most.Brands are not finding it any simpler with mobile expansion. Consumer expectations are raised by fierce competition, which drives firms to pursue more features, better usability, and more aesthetically pleasing products. But if the program performs poorly, none of this will matter because:

• If an app doesn't work the first time, 79% of users will try it no more than twice (HPE)
• A poor mobile experience, according to 52% of users, makes them less likely to interact with a firm ever again (Think with Google)
• App crashes account for 71% of all uninstallation from mobile devices (AppSamurai)

How is an App Effective?

An app is effective when:

• It loads fast (up to 2 seconds)
• It is compatible with the devices being used (system requirements, screen resolution, etc.)
• It has a reasonable memory and battery consumption rate
• It preserves user data and progress while in the background state 
• There is a smooth integration with necessary third-party apps and device services (such as camera, Bluetooth, calendar, etc.), and so on.

However, when these features are missing, the app starts to misbehave. In this blog post, we will be discussing every possible way to help you improve the performance of your mobile app.

Image Optimization

While using high-quality photos might give an app a pleasing appearance, they can also affect how well it performs. An app's performance is improved and lags are reduced when graphics and graphic elements are optimized. Although a user will benefit more from a larger image but utilizing an image that is larger than what is shown on the screen is pointless. Using low-quality photos from the start is not the best technique to manage image optimization, as the UX of your app may suffer as a result. Therefore, you ought to make better use of image compression and resizing. The size of an image can be reduced through compression without reducing the resolution. Resizing, on the other hand, refers to adjusting a picture's size so the app can properly display it. This will help prevent your app from consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth. 

Maintain Quality Code For The App 

It's crucial to maintain high-quality code to make sure your mobile application runs smoothly. Well-written, high-quality code, also known as "clean code" can guarantee that your program operates correctly, lowering the possibility of issues developing for end users.Or, to paraphrase C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup; he said, “I value efficiency and elegance in my programming. To make it difficult for problems to hide, the logic should be simple, and there should be few dependencies so that maintenance is simple.”Your mobile application's performance is impacted by each of these factors, and ignoring them could have serious consequences.

• Technical debt: This is the gradual rise of bugs and coding errors that, over time, degrade code quality and app reliability. 
• Dead code: This is code that is executed but whose results are not used. Early versions of your app may not notice much of a difference from dead code, but as you scale up and make your app more sophisticated, optimizing your code will become increasingly important.
• Keep an eye out for memory leaks and fix them as soon as possible. Otherwise, the system terminates a program due to a memory shortage if excessive data cannot be deleted from RAM (random access memory). To monitor the lifecycle of objects and manage memory utilization, use a memory profiler.
• Consider how much power an app is using at different stages of operation, such as when it's running in the background.

If these flaws are not addressed, they can worsen and end up being the main reason for app crashes and performance difficulties, costing you a lot of money to fix.

Enhance Client-Server Communication

One of the most crucial requirements for a successful product that people adore and stick with is the capacity for perfect performance. Organize information and items according to their uses, and make requests when necessary. This method aids in reducing the quantity of data loaded, which has the effect of hastening app loading. Always bear this in mind while designing and building Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that users utilize connections that are slower and less consistent than 4G, such as 3G. A content delivery network (CDN) is a great solution to solve these problems and speed up APIs, which will enhance the performance of your app as a whole. To speed up API communication, a CDN will employ servers dispersed across a large geographic area. This will shorten the distance between a user and the data source. Using servers close to individual users' locations minimizes payload, latency, size, and round-trip time, which dramatically boosts app performance. This is as opposed to each user receiving data from a single server location.

Limit The Use of Unnecessary Features.

Some mobile app developers believe that the user experience will improve as they add more features. However, "less is more" also applies when it comes to mobile apps. You could want to consider the number of functions your program offers and determine which ones you can reduce, which is almost similar to deleting useless code. Many programs contain redundant parts that are merely included for show or to offer features that consumers seldom use.If your software has too many of these unnecessary features, it could become oversized, which would slow down performance and increase load times. The load time is particularly significant because users have a low threshold for opening-time-intensive apps. When they launch an app, they anticipate it to be immediately accessible. Users may become impatient with slow-loading apps, which may cause them to leave and delete your app.

Create Offline Mode For Your App

It's great to communicate with and receive data from third-party apps, but what happens if the internet connection is unstable? Therefore, to maintain data access in the event of a network connection failure, create an offline mode. It guarantees user convenience, information security, and dependability. Because we frequently use mobile devices, we may have grown accustomed to always having an internet connection and have stopped thinking about alternatives. Network problems will continue to be a big detriment to app performance. However, your app can effectively address some of the problems brought on by a bad network connection by adding an offline mode. Even when users are in an area with a weak signal or when their connection is unstable, you should aim to make your app responsive and interesting.An alternative to improve the performance of your mobile app is dynamic caching. Dynamic caching, as opposed to static caching, is used for data that is dynamic and varies from user to user. The user's data and input can be temporarily kept locally on the device in an offline situation via dynamic caching. They can be synchronized once the app is back online. This feature prevents the program from going offline with a blank screen and can store user data in the event of a disconnect.Regardless of the technique your team chooses, an offline version of your software can provide users with a dependable and responsive experience without the stress of losing important data. The best practices to achieve this include studying user behavior to provide the content and functionality users require offline, preserving users' in-app progress, alerting when the network is offline, and creating an empty state for offline use. Allowing users to download content so that it may be used offline is also advantageous for music players and maps. 

Continue Your Performance Testing

After you've done all you can to enhance mobile app performance, keep an eye on it. Performance Testing will be useful because your app will be subjected to rising load volumes as it expands, which will have an impact on how responsive it would be. Additionally, it shouldn't be disregarded when your mobile application develops and flourishes after it has been released. The advice we provided in this post is a fantastic place to start if you want to ensure that you and your tech team are prepared for performance difficulties.

Conclusion

You should be aware of stiff competition given the over 5 million mobile apps available across the top app stores in the world. One of the most crucial requirements for a successful product that people adore and stick with is the capacity for perfect performance. By implementing these suggestions, we hope you can enhance the functionality of your current and future apps, making them usable and beneficial for consumers. However, if you have completed the checklist but your app is still performing slowly, you should conduct a more thorough app performance test to identify the root cause and properly resolve it.