Nearly 50% of users experience daily app performance issues; monitoring app performance is the number one challenge reported by mobile engineers.

Embrace, the solution to help engineers build better mobile experiences, released the State of Mobile Experience report detailing mobile end users’ and builders’ perspectives of performance issues and app experiences. The three-part study combines input from mobile engineers at industry leading companies and app users, as well as rich data from Embrace’s mobile experience engineering platform. The insights reveal how app performance issues have far reaching consequences for mobile teams.

Nothing is more frustrating than when an app crashes, takes forever to start up, or freezes at an inopportune moment. But do poor experiences mean the same thing for app users versus the engineers who build the products they’re consuming? Embrace’s research shows that while these types of issues are a top concern for app users, mobile engineers report their top challenge is monitoring app performance.

“Mobile users’ high expectations for speed, stability, and ease of use are going up and to the right,” said Andrew Tunall, Head of Product at Embrace. “Without the right toolkit, mobile engineering teams are blind as they try to deliver great app experiences. And if you miss the mark, the result can be really poor app reviews and uninstalls.”

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Report Highlights

App Users’ Frustrations

• Speed is crucial: 1 in 5 users won’t wait more than 5 seconds to log in to an account, complete a purchase, or play multimedia.
• Issues are too common: 48% of users say they experience an app issue daily. Reported issues include slow startup, slow images, freezing, crashes, and unresponsive buttons.
• Crashes frustrate users the most: Users feel the most frustrated when an app crashes suddenly, and app freezes, inability to fill out forms, and unresponsive links or buttons also add to their frustrations. Slow app startup, slow image load, and slow video load are comparatively less vexing for users.
• Users are not afraid to uninstall: 60% of users said they would uninstall an app that has crashed a few times.

Top Development Challenges for Mobile Engineers

• User monitoring isn’t easy: When asked about the key challenges engineers are facing in app development today, monitoring app performance topped the list.
• They’re worried about specific app performance issues: Mobile engineers are most concerned about remedying crashes and slow app startup. However, users don’t rank slow app startup as one of their top frustrations.
• Issues have consequences: Engineers’ biggest concerns are the loss of brand trust stemming from frustrating app experiences and bad reviews on app stores. App deletions also rank highly on the list of concerns.
• Teams must keep up with rapidly changing tech: Engineers overwhelmingly think AI and machine learning will most dramatically impact mobile app development in the next 5 years.

Benchmarking Mobile App Excellence – Embrace Data

• iOS apps show greater stability vs. Android apps across industries: iOS performed better with regard to crash-free sessions and low memory warnings. (Unity, Flutter and React Native are considered separately by iOS and Android.)
• Some categories seem to deliver better user experiences: On iOS, Education and Real Estate apps had the highest percentage of user-termination free sessions. Hospitality and Delivery verticals rank highest on Android. Gaming apps rank the lowest in measures of good app user experience across iOS and Android.

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Key Takeaways

Priorities differ between builders and end-users. For more critical issues like crashes, both agree that these are the most frustrating and critical-to-address. Slow startup, while high priority for engineers, is less frustrating for users. Bridging this disconnect and others uncovered in the report might better serve end users.

Developer-focused analyst firm Redmonk noted the value in aligning developers’ perspectives with real users’ experiences and led a conversation with Embrace’s product team about the takeaways from the report.

“Mobile engineers are deeply concerned about app performance,” said Kate Holterhoff, Analyst at Redmonk. “There’s a clear need for tools that foster a better understanding of users and improved app performance. This sort of visibility empowers mobile teams to reduce friction and focus on creating great mobile experiences. By acknowledging the gap between app users’ perspectives and the developer’s own, organizations can set the stage to build better apps and stay competitive.”

Understanding real users’ app experiences is a clear priority, both now and in the future. Mobile experience engineering provides granular detail into every user session, allowing teams to quickly remedy issues and maximize their attention on building.

Methodology

• App Users: Embrace surveyed more than 900 app users in the U.S. to understand their frustrations.
• Mobile Engineers: Embrace polled nearly 80 developers, engineers, and managers who work on mobile apps to get their perspectives on performance priorities and concerns.
• Embrace Data: Embrace analyzed customer data across iOS and Android apps from a variety of categories including mobile gaming, e-commerce, hospitality, and IoT. Embrace analyzed the performance data of all customers in aggregate, and benchmarked this performance across key stability and experience indicators by industry.