iOS App Performance Monitoring: Best Practices

If you want your iOS app to guarantee consistent performance alongside an engaging user experience, you ought to monitor and optimize the functionalities over time. Talk about the UI speed, stability, or CPU usage, there are a lot of traits that go into iOS application performance monitoring. You ought to use tools and metrics to track them all and determine the level and frequency of optimization your app needs. 

A slow response to the user inputs, delayed launch time, or sluggish interactivity are a few issues that can deter a user from keeping your app on their device. It is because such issues trigger extensive network requests, increasing a user’s data charges, and also draining the device battery. So, how to ensure that doesn’t happen with your iOS app?

Well, there are certain best practices proposed for you to adopt for monitoring the performance of your app, and take necessary steps to optimize the loose ends. Read this article till the end to learn about the most common and crucial measures you can take. 

What are the Important iOS App Performance Monitoring Metrics?

Before getting along with the ideal practices you can adopt for iOS performance monitoring, it is important you know about the metrics you are supposed to track for this quest:

1. Crash-Free Rate or Stability

The stability of your iOS app will depend on the number of crashes it experiences per user or session. There are certain standards specified by the industry, indicating that your app should adhere to a crash-free rate of 99% for the users and 99.95% for the sessions. 

To give you a perspective, it means that 99 out of 100 of your iOS app users must not experience any crash. Following that, 999 out of 1000 sessions on your app must be free from unwanted crashes. It is the basic criterion that specifies optimal stability of the app. 

2. Launch Time

The quality of your application will be better assessed by its launch speed, setting the first impression among users. There have been several wide-scale analysis reports stating that most of the iOS apps tend to complete a cold launch in 2-3 seconds. 

You must aim at achieving a cold launch for your iOS app to complete within 1.5 to 2 seconds. Following that, a warm launch and hot app launch should complete within <1 second and <0.5 second, respectively. 

3. Speed of Login Execution

It is an important metric to monitor the performance of your app that leads to the end-user experience. You must evaluate the client-side logic of the application and determine the time it takes to execute the long traces. 

As per the average metrics, the key traces must be addressed and completed by the app within or under 2 seconds. Anything above that, you might have to optimize the app performance to improve the login execution speed. 

4. Network Response

The overall speed & responsiveness of your iOS app depend on your network, and its response time. There have been multiple studies that report that your app must respond to the users’ requests in less than 1 second. 

The reports also indicate that there are many applications across the App Store that fail to meet this requirement, mostly due to slow or unreliable services. Optimizing on this metric can be the deal-breaker for ensuring consistent performance for your app. 

5. UI Responsiveness

There are numerous reasons that might trigger your app’s UI to hang, but if the usual delay time surpasses the 250ms mark on average, it might be a problem! For worse, if the UI fails to respond to users’ requests or inputs, it calls for an emergency downtime.

Such UI hangs can disrupt the focus and interest of your users, leading them to abandon your app. Your aim should be to prioritize monitoring this metric and fixing the root causes before negative reports start coming in. 

Best Practices for iOS App Performance Monitoring

In order to efficiently execute iOS performance monitoring, you must adhere to some of the best practices as specified by the industry leaders. The best ones include:

1. Monitor the Right Metrics and Set Benchmarks

You ought to go beyond the standard requirements for collecting performance data for improving your iOS application. Create certain benchmarks that can ensure your app not only meets the basic needs but also surpasses the expectations of users. 

For that, you must start monitoring the key metrics specified above, such as launch time, network response, crash report, stability score, UI responsiveness, and others. Following that, create benchmarks with ideal measurements for such metrics, and strive to achieve them. 

2. Use the Right Tools

Apple does offer its low-level performance monitoring & optimization tools for you to leverage. However, they aren’t always proficient at catching real-world issues that the users experience while using your app. 

For instance, there might be a subtle edge case that is affecting only a small group of your users, but is leading your app to poor performance and user experience. Take the help of professionals who would empower your iOS app performance monitoring efforts with high-end tools, capable of surfacing even the smallest of performance hiccups. 

Picking the right tools will give you the potential to derive thorough information on the performance issues and fix them accordingly. 

3. Contextualization of Errors

In correspondence with the crash report you generate for your iOS app, you must also prioritize determining a proper context for those issues. It will help you understand how extensive the problem is and what you can do to isolate it. 

For that, you can collect all the data possible from multiple user sessions that crashed or resulted in errors. This approach will provide you with an important insight into reducing the MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery/Repair/Resolution). 

The key data that you must obtain in order to create a context for the crash errors are: distributed request traces, symbolicated stack traces, app & infrastructure logs, user metadata, and user actions. 

4. Sorting & Filtering of the Performance Errors

By using dedicated tools, you must prioritize the performance errors in your iOS app, ensuring optimal focus on the most critical issues first. You must filter and sort any potential bugs or issues based on different criteria such as event counts, app version, or user-reported bugs. 

Not just that, but in pursuit of prioritizing your app performance flaws, you can also configure the notifications based on the same criteria. This way, the right members of your team will be alerted about the issue, and a prompt action can be initiated. 

How Can Simpalm Help You with iOS Performance Testing & Monitoring?

Performance is the key to ensure your application stands out in the crowd of competitors, and gives you the expected returns in the long run. At Simpalm, we make it easy for you to constantly track the performance quotient of your iOS app and take the necessary steps to optimize the potential flaws. 

We have a big team of skilled professionals, proficient in testing and monitoring the key performance metrics of your application. In the form of a detailed report, we will provide you with a comprehensive report on areas where your app is lagging in terms of performance. Not just that, but we can also help you optimize, maintain, and improve the app’s performance, without any extensive downtime. 

With Simpalm, a leading iOS app development agency, you will be at the top of your iOS performance monitoring game! You will be able to detect the possible bottlenecks in your app and take timely measures to maintain a consistent performance. 

From building you a high-performance iOS app to ensuring its post-launch maintenance, update & support, Simpalm offers you comprehensive service solutions to count on! 

Conclusion

Building and deploying an iOS application doesn’t guarantee your long-term and ongoing success. It is the timely performance checks and improvements that count! The more satisfying the user experience of your app is, the higher its chances in the competitive industry. So, adopting consistent iOS performance monitoring measures can be an effective way to determine the problematic areas and fix them before they hamper the experience of your users.

Let Simpalm be your service partner in adhering to the best app performance monitoring practices specified above, and guarantee consistent growth and acceptance for it among users. Get in touch with us to know more about how we can help you in this quest!