05 December, 2013

Are your users quitting your app?

You can always launch a popular mobile app by keeping in mind the current trends in technology and customer demand. But you must remember that each customer has options to choose from a large collection of apps offering similar features and functionalities. Therefore, it becomes essential to optimize the efficiency and performance of your mobile app to beat completion. Many reports have highlighted that over 50% of mobile app users will exit if a system doesn't load within 5 seconds. So your development plan must consider some of the key measures make the mobile application work faster. You can even consider some of the most effective practices to make the app faster and popular.

4 Smart Ways to Make Your Mobile App Work Faster

1) Optimize the Images
mobile apps development
Often the loading speed of a mobile application is impacted by the quality of images. In comparison to the images displayed on desktops, the mobile app images need to be smaller. Further, the images must be scaled to the right size to avoid several issues related to performance and memory. At the same time, you can further reduce the load on server by scaling the images to the size exactly required by the mobile device. The correctly sized images will make your app load faster by reducing the workload on the device as well as server.

2) Use JSON Web Services
The mobile application developers have options to create web services using several technologies like SOAP and XML, and JSON. Many experts have highlighted how the XML responses are much larger than JSON responses. As the mobile app normally do not display all fields on a page to users, you must ensure that the server is returning only the data required by the client. The workload on the server can be reduced drastically by specifying which fields will be included in a request. As entity tags (ETags) are a part of HTTP, you can even consider using these to deliver the content that are not updated or modified frequently.

3) Prioritize Client Requests
Similar to websites, a mobile app also needs to handle several client requests at a time. So you must differentiate client requests to reduce the app loading time. It is also important to prioritize the requests by implementing an efficient request queue. The request queue will further cancel the requests that are no longer relevant, or block users to perform a new action. At the same time, you also need to ensure that the connections are reused to idle cycles are used to respond to the next request. In case the network is not reliable, you can even consider queuing up a batch of client requests till the internet connectivity is back.

4) Look for Smart Ways to Implement Caching
Each app can be designed with cache to memory as well as to the file system using ETags. You can always consider a caching option that does not go over the network. If you decide to cache to the file system, it is a good idea to restrict the number of concurrent file accesses, along with deleting the irrelevant data. Further, you have to predict the upcoming user requests, while caching the responses already sent to the user. When the next set of user requests are already cached before the user requests, the user can access content at once. The smart caching implementation will further help you in delivering optimized user experience.

The mobile application must be tested thoroughly under different conditions and emulating maximum use behavior. Along with the development strategy, your testing plan for the application also needs to identify the flaws that increase its loading time. Before you take a decision to hire mobile application programmer for your app idea, it is highly suggested to evaluate the vendor’s expertise in not only product/app development but also testing.

We provide mobile apps development services. If you would like to know more about the expertise of our top mobile app developers, please visit Mindfire Solutions.

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