You love the action game you are playing. You have cross around 55 levels of the 60 level games. You are now on the verge of defeating the master bad guy when suddenly, the game stops working and crashes. You reopen the game only to find all your progress lost. Can be quite frustrating and can even lead you to leave playing that game altogether, right?
Well, believe it or not, mobile game development coding is still in its early days and so does not have a rigorous testing procedure. In some ways, if you find the game crashing and report it to the developers, they might not really know where things have gone wrong or where to start. Without proper testing mechanisms, the problem becomes larger.
To solve this problem, companies like Crittercism and AppDynamics have come into foray. Both these companies do what we call Application Performance Management (APM). These companies make themselves useful to companies when the company’s app crashes. Helping determine the possible causes of the crash, they make the process a whole lot simpler. With mobile apps becoming a major player in business revenue, proper APM is a necessity. It’s simple. If your app goes down, it can cost you a lot of money. From bad reviews to lower revenues, everything can go wrong.
What Does An App Need?
To understand what APM does, let’s look at the basics of every app. Every app should deliver on performance and exhibit no lag time. People will operate apps on a multitude of devices and so it is a good idea to test your app thoroughly. APM companies measure the real time performance of the app to determine how well it is faring. One of the important things is to know how often an app crashes and gather different metrics including app usage and when the app normally crashes. Was the user doing a particular act when the app crashed or does the app crashes on specific devices with a specific operating system?
While app crash rates of around 1-2% can be considered normal, most apps have crash rates way above the limit. With no norms as such and mobile app development somewhat still new, it is often difficult to determine the cause. Oftentimes, we see that the cause is related to an applications programming related issue. For instance, the ad showing or being inserted on your app from some other third party provider may make the app crash.
Whenever developing apps, it is important for developers to pay importance to factors like performance, load time and search queries. While better performance means nicer reviews, lessening load time increases user engagement. Good uses of terms helps users find the app easily on the app store.
