The mobile app marketplace for Android and iOS users is incredibly saturated. Every element of the user experience and backend design needs to be perfect to retain customers in this kind of cutthroat environment.
70% of mobile app users will abandon an app if it’s taking too long to load, but unfortunately, it’s increasingly difficult to fully test app performance and find ways to improve its performance and usability.
That’s where Product Science (PS) comes in: The PS Toolset simplifies mobile performance management — offering an-easy to use AI-powered tool with real time side-by-side monitoring of user experience and runtime data to look under the hood of an app — and then our tools help implement these code-level actionable insights to improve an app’s performance and the end-user’s experience.
Finding the right way to measure performance
Most front- and backend developers are familiar with the basics of performance, especially in a dev or test environment with unlimited resources. But when it’s necessary to dig deeper into how a particular code will actually work and how it'll be executed on the device in the real world, our surveys of mobile app developers have found that they usually have not been exposed to the fundamentals of performance engineering in the mobile device environment.
The myriad of frameworks and libraries that made software development easier has also added a level of abstraction. Developers can use them to develop the most complex apps but they no longer need to know — in fact, are no longer capable of understanding — the orchestration of different components and intricacies of how the code executes. In terms of performance management, using all these libraries and frameworks means understanding the performance of multiple threads simultaneously — it is a job often-too-complicated even for seasoned performance engineers.
Mobile performance management, the right way
It became clear to the Product Science founding team that the traditional approach to performance management and observability no longer works for mobile development and there aren’t enough performance engineers to help everyone. Moreover, without an awareness of how the code is run by all the frameworks and libraries, optimizing this code becomes an impossible task. Finding and observing all the interconnectivities of functions when using hundreds of threads can’t be performed manually.
It’s easy to become faster
Our Product Science AI-powered tool makes the impossible possible. It helps mobile developers transform into performance engineers, capable of detecting performance issues and improving upon them. Here’s how:
- Product Science uses new algorithms to automatically instrument a codebase in minutes, instead of months. For example, we saved one client 794 hours of performance engineers manually running diagnostics, and 1820 hours for another.
- The PS Tool’s findings helped one e-commerce company optimize its app start time to run 39% faster.
- With privacy and security in mind, the PS Tool doesn’t access user data or production code. The PS Tool is easy to set up and doesn’t require additional developer resources.
- The tool provides code-level actionable insights, such as improving app start time, identifying network requests, discovery of slowly executed functions, and identification of improperly busy threads. For one tech company, we identified 18 seconds of improvements for users with high end devices, including in the app start and in one of their key user flows.
Diversity at the heart
Not only does the PS Tool transform mobile developers into performance engineers, it is designed to improve the user experience for all users (and help retain them). Most apps are built and maintained for the latest devices and OS versions, while most users continue to use outdated versions. This means, the traditional approach to optimizing load times will leave these users behind.
After all, software engineers are likely to have the latest smartphones and won’t even stop to think about apps lagging on older phones. But in order to retain all of the users and deliver a great product, it’s important to put them first, and this means that the developer team should study performance in an environment representative of the audience. When a team is diverse, it helps get a better understanding of users’ experience, their needs, and available to them technology.
That’s why the Product Science team consists of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs, who use their diverse knowledge, cultures, and life experiences to better understand what makes a particular product better, more inclusive and relevant.
Studies have shown that diverse companies outperform less diverse ones by 36% in profitability, innovate at a much faster rate, and are able to significantly increase productivity. At Product Science, our team members come from many different backgrounds and their diverse insights lead to significant improvements in user experience for our clients’ apps — and make them run much faster. Putting users first was the reason we launched Product Science.
From a business point of view, it’s really pretty simple. In the multi-billion industry of mobile apps every second counts and the Product Science Toolset can enable developers to find improvements to make an app run substantially faster, a big competitive advantage.
As for the future, our industry will continue to grow, and we believe that tools like ours will become essential. Application development will evolve with various types of dev and pipeline tools. We imagine AI will be a co-pilot of software architect and help writing code in a few years from now — our Product Science Tool is a trailblazer among them — to ensure that code is efficient and its performance is measured accurately.
We are just starting… join us on this journey into the world of performance done right!
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