Most marketers these days are aware of the classic purchase funnel concept. It starts with building awareness for users unfamiliar with a brand, and it gradually moves an ever-decreasing number of them toward a conversion or brand sale. In the old days, this could involve imprecise “carpet bombing” techniques like mass media advertising with little in the way of measurable results. Continue reading “How to Streamline Your E-Commerce Funnel”
You can find hundreds of blogs and websites that will tell you how important it is to make your app’s conversion funnel as smooth as possible. The more friction there is, the more churn you can expect, and that’s not where you want your company to be. Continue reading “Improving Your Conversion Funnel in 4 Steps”
When you find out that your app is crashing for some of your users, you know it’s time to start digging through data to figure out what’s wrong, and what you need to do to correct it.
Where to start? We believe the best approach is to begin the debugging process by looking at aggregate performance levels of your app on different devices, to get a sense of how well the app is performing overall, and then drilling down to individual user’s experiences until you find the answer. Embrace lets you do both easily.
Right away we can look at what percent of your users are using which device, and of those, what percent of them are crashing. If one or more devices is crashing above what its baseline percentage of users is, this tells you that you have issues that need to be addressed over and above any individual crashes. You now have a head start on what work you might need to do.
Let’s use Out Of Memory exception errors as an example, although we would do the same thing for other types of crashes. In our example, we can see that the iPhone 6 Plus and iPad Air 2 are causing OOM errors way beyond what they should, based on their number of app users. The same is true for iOS 11.2.1 and 11.4. What common features do these devices and OS versions have that may lead to the problem? You’ve got someplace to start.
Next, we start looking at individual crashes. Now you see where the Embrace approach to app performance monitoring makes your job much easier. When you drill down deeper, you can see each crash sorted by the last screen the user viewed, which lets you focus on a possible cause for the issue.
Clicking on any of the crashes lets us look at the relevant information about the context of the crash, so we can try to figure out the cause.
Looking more closely, we can see exactly what the user was doing from the time they launched your app until the OOM error appeared. That includes the time they spent elsewhere while your app was in the background. Every event, such as a network call or adding an item to a shopping cart, is available to examine. You can see where they tapped on the screen, and view a screenshot of what they were looking at. You also get a complete profile of the user’s device, including how much of their hard memory was used.
You don’t need a phone call to the user to ask all the usual questions, because we provide that info for every user, and every session. If your app provides user IDs to your user, we’ll show you all sessions by that user. We provide a complete set of error logs, each of which allows you to look not only at all the errors generated, but drill down into each error to see all of the information we’ve gathered, and also see other errors that the same user has experienced.
No one else provides this level of visibility into your app’s user activities. It’s the kind of information that helps you get to the bottom of problems as quickly and efficiently as possible. Interested in seeing Embrace in action? Take it for a test drive today!
“Work smarter, not harder” so the mantra goes. Who couldn’t agree? When it comes to app development, one might rephrase this as “don’t do a bunch of stuff you don’t have to do yet.” The gruff manner of this paraphrase isn’t meant to be funny as much as to highlight the benefits that become possible with a no-nonsense, prioritized approach to app development. Continue reading “Lowest Hanging Fruit for Improving App Performance”
Even the most successful mobile apps have growing pains along the way. With so many different devices—with different RAM size, processors, and OS versions—errors and crashes are inevitable. Continue reading “Debugging App Crashes: The Step By Step Guide”
You may only get one chance for your smartphone app to cut through the noise and make a meaningful impact on a consumer. You have to make the most of that chance because these days, users don’t put up with sluggish apps. And they don’t have to; app marketplaces are competitive, and there are many substitutes from which to choose. Continue reading “Three Benefits of Speed and Reliability For Your Mobile App”
One reason that developing software for mobile devices can be so much more challenging than developing for desktops/laptops or other hardware, according to ThoughtBot’s Steff Kelsey, is that resources are limited. One particularly sparse resource is RAM. Because of this, Out-of-Memory exception errors (OOMs) are common on iOS, especially if you’re dealing with large files in your app. Continue reading “Are Your OOM Issues Device-Related?”
For developers coming from the world of web and desktop applications, mobile development offers a wealth of new opportunities. Many developers find that the mobile arena provides an avenue to compete with more established titles in ways not previously possible in the desktop market. Still other developers are quick to take advantage of the innovations that mobile technologies make possible—innovations not easily duplicated in desktop or web-based applications. Continue reading “Debugging Checklist: Top 3 Things That Hurt Your App”
You only get one chance to make a good first impression and, for mobile developers, that one chance is your app’s interface. A quick look at the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store will provide a plethora of examples of apps with negative reviews because of poor interface design. Continue reading “User Interface Best Practices: Seven Things You Should Focus On When Designing Your App”
One of the biggest trends currently impacting mobile development is the rise of hybrid apps. For many developers, hybrid apps are the Holy Grail of mobile development. Some articles have even gone so far as to claim that the battle between native and hybrid apps is over, with hybrid coming up the winner. Is that the case? Are hybrid apps the clear winner in mobile development? Continue reading “Native vs Hybrid Apps: Which Should You Choose?”
