App Performance Is Key to Your Mobile App Growth Strategy

In today's mobile-first world, mobile apps play a crucial role in our personal and professional lives.

With our growing reliance on these apps, user expectations have grown exponentially. In addition to useful and innovative features, mobile app users expect seamless, high-performance mobile experiences, putting pressure on businesses to deliver.

The mobile app industry is a growing and lucrative market, but it’s also highly competitive. No matter what your app does, chances are you will have at least a few competitors who more or less do the exact same thing. If your mobile app experience does not deliver, users will not hesitate to make the switch.

This blog post will explore the strategic importance of mobile app performance and its impact on the growth and success of businesses. We'll also discuss the challenges developers face in optimizing app performance and provide insights into building a mobile app growth strategy.

The barrier to your mobile app growth strategy

Regardless of the mobile app growth strategies and tactics you adopt, it will be difficult to find success without delivering a good, if not great, user experience. Mobile users demand an app experience that is not only better than your competitors but on par with their favorite apps like Instagram and TikTok.

Unfortunately, many mobile teams fall into the trap of overprioritizing new product features over a smooth user experience. While new product features and innovations are critical to delivering value to your users and differentiating in the market, they will be largely irrelevant if they are a pain to use.

Whether you are focused on product-led growth with a freemium model and referrals or aggressively investing in sales and mobile app marketing, apps that freeze or are slow to launch and load frustrate their users and are promptly uninstalled or replaced.

Mobile app performance and user experience 

Although seemingly minor, performance issues like slow loading times have a profound effect on mobile users and their experience. Research in human-computer interaction (HCI) and neurology dating back to the 1960s has repeatedly found that loading and response times significantly affect users.

Humans are more comfortable and productive with loading times below a maximum of two seconds because it enables them to maintain thinking continuity and avoid interrupting their train of thought. Once the two-second threshold is reached, people need to exert 50% more effort just to maintain their concentration.

Research has also shown that slow loading times affect more than productivity, inducing powerful real-world emotions. The more serious the performance issue, the more intense the emotional response. One survey found that 68% of mobile shoppers who faced a crash felt like throwing their devices at the wall.

With all that in mind, it becomes abundantly clear that the stability and performance of your mobile app can make or break your mobile app growth strategy.

The opportunities and costs of performance 

Acquisition, retention, conversion, and revenue per user are the four main growth drivers for any business, and every mobile app growth strategy aims to improve one or more of these pillars. Let’s examine how mobile app performance affects each one.

Acquisition

With the current distribution model for mobile apps, virtually all app downloads go through Apple and Google’s official app stores. This means that nearly everyone will visit your app store page, and while they’re there, almost all of them will check your app rating before hitting the download button.

Mobile apps with a crash-free rate below 99.9% are much more likely to be rated below three stars.

On the other end of the spectrum, 89% of mobile users who have a positive experience will actively recommend your app.

All that doesn’t even take into account the fact that both Apple and Google factor in mobile app stability and performance to calculate app store rankings.

Simply put, poor mobile app performance will decrease your app’s visibility and make users less likely to download your app, leading to falling conversion rates and rapidly rising customer acquisition costs.

Retention

Retention has perhaps the highest impact on a business's revenue. This might sound surprising, but it makes a lot of sense when you start to dig deeper into the numbers. 

Returning customers are more valuable to a business than new customers; they spend more money. The average spend of repeat customers can grow by as much as 45% after shopping with a brand for 36 months.

Pinpointing and improving the pain points of your mobile app's experience can help boost your retention rate. It's vital to remember that different categories of mobile apps generally have different user retention rates, so you should set your expectations depending on the type of app you offer.

Conversion

Performance and loading speed have been repeatedly proven to have a huge impact on conversion rates on desktop websites, mobile websites, and mobile apps.

Mobile users reward brands that meet their high standards. For every 0.1-second improvement in loading speed, conversion rates can increase by up to 10%, and a 1-second improvement can boost them by up to 27%.

Mobile users expect a smooth and snappy mobile experience, and even minor performance delays can turn them off. If you don't optimize your mobile app's performance, users are less likely to convert, resulting in a significant loss of potential revenue.

Revenue per user

Mobile app performance doesn’t just influence whether your users will convert, it also determines how much money they will spend.

Better mobile experiences lead to higher spending — ALDO illustrates the extent of this impact well. While analyzing their mobile app’s performance, they found that users who experience quick loading times generate 75% more revenue than average and 327% more than those who experience slow loading times. After prioritizing and improving their app’s performance, ALDO saw a 10% boost in revenue in just four months.

High-performing apps earn customer loyalty and increase their spending, while those with subpar performance leave money on the table.

The challenges of mobile apps

Mobile app development differs greatly from traditional web and mobile web development, posing a unique set of challenges to mobile teams. To understand why mobile apps fail, let’s review the key differences and their implications.

Distribution model

The highly centralized mobile app distribution model is a paradigm shift from the traditional distribution model for web apps. Let's get into what this entails. 

Packaged binaries

Unlike web and mobile web apps, mobile apps are packaged as code binaries that users can download and run on their devices. Your app will not be running on your servers, eliminating your control over the environment it runs on, as well as the app version that is running.

This exponentially increases the devices, OS versions, environments, and app versions you need to support and makes it practically impossible to test every possible combination.

Gatekeepers

The other key distinction of the mobile app distribution model is its highly centralized nature. Virtually all app downloads go through Apple and Google’s official app stores, giving them immense control over your app's visibility and success.

For better or for worse, this forces you to play by their rules and spend time and effort to satisfy their standards and optimize for their algorithms.

Environment diversity and fragmentation

With your mobile app running on end-user devices, you will see an exponential increase in the devices, OS versions, environments, and app versions you need to support. This dramatically increases the chance of errors and edge cases.

High cost of failure

By nature, mobile app issues suffer from exceptionally long recovery times, attributed to three main hurdles.

First, the high fragmentation in environments introduces a lot of complexity to the process of validating and fixing issues. Additionally, mobile teams often do not have access to the device information and error logs necessary for mobile app debugging and fixing issues, further adding to the time needed to deal with them.

Second, after you fix the issue, you have to submit a new version to the app store and wait for it to be reviewed and accepted, which can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days.

Finally, once your new app version is live on the app store, your users need to download the update before the issue gets resolved. Unfortunately, not many mobile users enable automatic updates or update their app within the first seven days.

This means that mobile app issues will continue to affect your users for a couple of days to a couple of weeks even if you respond immediately.

A mobile app growth strategy requires a mobile-first mindset

Successful mobile app growth strategies must consider the intricacies of the mobile app experience and lifecycle, tailoring their approach accordingly. Adopting a mobile-first mindset enables mobile teams to adapt to the challenges of mobile app development and optimize their process and workflow effectively.

Use mobile-specific metrics

Judging your mobile app’s user experience effectively requires you to use mobile app metrics that accurately represent your users’ experience.

To maximize your app store performance, start with the metrics that influence your app store ranking, like Application Not Responding (ANR) errors, out-of-memory (OOM) crashes, app launch time, hangs, and hitches. Moreover, you should gain visibility over your app’s screen loading times, network request and response performance, UI rendering, key app flows, and user frustration signals, like app termination.

Adapt to the mobile lifecycle

Since several versions of your app will be running simultaneously at any given time, you need to shift from a time perspective to a release perspective. Measuring stability and performance against releases lets you easily prioritize issues occurring on your latest and most adopted releases.

Additionally, you need to establish well-defined code ownership for your teams based on path or package and filename to increase accountability and make it easier to quickly route issues to the right team.

Address issues proactively

The lengthy recovery times suffered by mobile app issues require you to be highly proactive when it comes to mobile app issues if you want to mitigate their impact.

First and foremost, you need to raise your quality bar and continuously develop mobile app testing and code coverage practices to minimize the chance of issues in production. Next, you need to enhance your issue-detection capabilities to address issues before their impact grows and streamline your workflow to minimize your response and recovery time.

Finally, maintain frequent communication with your users to let them know the issues they are facing are on your radar and update them on their status. Don’t wait for your users to report a problem, and proactively ask them about their experience and what they would like to see improved.

Build a solid app before scaling

Before investing money, time, and effort into planning and executing your mobile app growth strategy, you need to ensure that your app works well. If your mobile app suffers from poor stability and performance, putting it in the hands of more users will only waste your resources and damage your reputation.

In a world where mobile apps have become integral to our lives, people have a high bar for their user experience. A stable and smooth mobile app experience is no longer a nice-to-have but the bare minimum. Mobile users are accustomed to the snappy performance of the leading mobile apps, and that is what they compare your app to.

All this is not to say that a well-planned mobile app growth strategy is not important, nor that a flawless mobile app performance is enough to supercharge your growth. Instead, they work hand-in-hand to help you maximize your return on investment and achieve sustainable mobile growth.

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Edited by Jigmee Bhutia