When you have an app that is experiencing issues, what do you do? If you are the end user, you more than likely fill out a help ticket within the app and wait for the app’s IT team to return your message. If you are the person in the IT department receiving and responding to these help tickets, you must become a detective to try and diagnose the issue. One of the most common issues reported is slow, sluggish app performance.
So today, we are going to explore possible reasons why your mobile app is slow and how to fix it.
Possible Causes
Narrowing down the exact cause of a slow-running app can be tricky. With all the variations in device models, platforms, operating system versions, internet carriers, and so on, the list of possible causes for the app’s slow behavior is long. But, one thing to remember is that a slow app is a symptom of an error, not the error itself. It’s like when you have a cough. Your doctor doesn’t simply give you cough medicine and send you on your way. Instead, he runs tests to find the cause of a cough. Then, he gives you medication to clear up the infection that is causing your cough, as well as cough medicine to make you feel better as soon as possible. So, what could cause an app to slow down? Here are a few possibilities:
- THE END USER’S DEVICE: As stated above, this is a difficult cause to diagnose because of the wide variations available to users worldwide. However, some common troubleshooting steps include checking the device for operating system failures, out-of-date operating systems, carrier issues, and device malfunctions.
- THE NETWORK: A slow app could be a sign of network issues. High network usage times (6pm-11pm Monday-Friday, all day Saturday and Sunday) will cause sluggish behavior for apps that use rich media, such as videos and music. Take into consideration the time of day an app is performing at a slow speed, as well as any known network issues being dealt with at the time (including maintenance downtimes).
- THE CLOUD: Sometimes the cloud server that is used in the operation of your app is overwhelmed with information traffic and therefore begins to slow down. Cloud outages in certain regions do happen sometimes, so being aware of these outages can save you a lot of time in diagnosing an app’s issue.
- THE APP: Although you hate to admit it, sometimes the problem is the app itself. Some of the most common reasons the app itself is causing a slow-down are microservices failures, bad data calls, and memory leaks. Check these areas first and if needed, delve deeper into the app’s coding and infrastructure.
How to Fix It
Whenever an app goes live, data is collected and analyzed to improve quality and end-user experiences. This data is also valuable when issues, like a slow running app, arise. Taking the data collected, you can isolate the problem as being an incident for just one user, or for many users. If there are many users experiencing the same issue, finding the common thread will lead you in the right direction of fixing the problem. Here are some tips to assist you when finding an error trend among users:
- Locate data on the performance of the app across locations, carriers, operating systems, etc.
- Track usages, errors, and crashes experienced. Make note of data thresholds and locations of users experiencing these problems.
- Trace activity and transactions from the user, over the network, and into the back end. This will help identify where the hiccup is in the process.
- Once the problem has been identified, fix the problem, test the fix, then inform the user that the issue has been taken care of.
Slow apps are inconvenient and cumbersome. Although we hope apps will never experience issues that will upset the end users, we also know that it is going to happen eventually. Apps are never perfect, so updates and monitoring are necessary to ensure a smooth user experience. Even though an IT team is there to help when problems arise, they should also be there to monitor an app before a problem even occurs. Monitoring an app’s performance, network, and infrastructure keep you ahead of the technical issues and keep your end users happy!
Here’s an Interesting blog post which talks about how to choose top app development company - https://www.gomeeki.com/mobile-application-development-company/
Arjun
