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Tag: app stability

  • Higher Mobile App Stability Begets Higher User Ratings

    Higher Mobile App Stability Begets Higher User Ratings

    In the competitive mobile market, application stability is imperative. Downtime leads to poor user experiences, which stunts growth and revenue. Apps that have poor stability suffer the consequences. In fact, new studies show that just a 1% lower stability ranking can lead to nearly a one-star drop in App Store ratings.

    Bugsnag recently released its 2021 Application Stability Index (ASI) report, Characteristics of Leading Mobile Apps. The study took 260 top-performing mobile apps across industries and reviewed each’s stability and end-user satisfaction. The study found that apps with solid stability tend to rank much higher in the App Store and maintain increased user engagement. The report also demonstrated that developers are pivoting to weekly releases to quickly address bugs, progressing from the bi-weekly standard for software updates.

    Below, I’ll review the specific details of the ASI and the report and consider how stability varies throughout industries. Hopefully, the results here will help other software teams benchmark their app’s performance and release cadence against top-performers within their sector.

    Stability = User Satisfaction

    When measuring uptime and availability, five nines, or 99.999% uptime, is the golden target for most teams. This report measured stability as the percentage of apps sessions that were crash-free. The median across market-leading apps was 99.80%.

    What’s interesting is that apps with more nines in their stability score achieve markedly higher App Store ratings. Apps that scored less than 99.00% had a median rating of 4.15, whereas apps with 99.99% to 100% measured uptime had a median rating of 4.70. The distribution of ratings was extremely wide for low-performing apps, compared to higher average scores for higher stability.

    What do these results say? Users expect uninterrupted sessions. Frequently occurring stability issues can damage the consumer’s opinion of an app, leading to dissatisfaction and harsh reviews. The more stable an app is, the better chance it has to drive consumer success.

    Stability by Industry

    The study also exposed stability differences between industries. B2B SaaS apps ranked relatively high, at 99.85%. This is likely because B2B software must meet service-level agreements (SLAs). Such services have fewer (yet more high-paying) customers to support, the report speculated. Mobile apps directly tied to the exchange of money, such as e-commerce (99.86%), travel and hospitality (99.90%) and financial and banking (99.85%) also ranked consistently high in stability.

    Coming in second were mobile apps in the business-to-consumer (B2C) (99.82%), consumer goods (99.80%) and health and wellness (99.78%) categories. Though these areas require decent availability to remain viable, they may not need such stringent SLAs. In such scenarios, non-stop availability isn’t as directly tied to end revenue.

    Lastly, apps with the worst stability were found in the mobile games (99.71%) and media and entertainment (99.65%) categories. Mobile gaming had the worst ratings of all industries; mean stability equated to over a full day of outage per year. Increased downtime in both categories is perhaps due to more problems with frequent media updates. These areas also tend to have a lower average revenue per user (ARPU), which may affect how teams value ongoing support.

    Deployment Frequencies

    According to the report, highly stable mobile apps tend to release at least once per week, replacing the bi-weekly norm for updates. Nearly all industries are pushing at least four releases per month, aside from consumer goods and travel and hospitality, at 2.5 and 4 respectively. E-commerce takes the cake with a mean of seven releases per month.

    Nowadays, progressive delivery is made possible due to increased emphasis on CI/CD. Therefore, rapid deployment frequencies are the norm. Releasing new versions more quickly can help appease users with new features. It’s also helpful to quickly patch bugs and decrease mean time to recovery (MTTR) for major incidents.

    Users Love Stable Apps

    Throughout the pandemic, digital reliance soared—84% of consumers said applications were a lifeline to normality, found a recent AppDynamics report. In this climate, mobile applications are critical to delivering valuable interactions.

    Yet, user expectations have evolved. Now, it’s readily apparent that stability directly impacts consumer confidence. The ASI findings behoove engineers to edge closer to the five-nines goal. The more nines you have, the better off you are.

    “The results of our second ASI report highlight the need for better proactive error monitoring and stability management to help engineering teams build healthier apps that deliver superior customer experiences,” said James Smith, SVP of the Bugsnag Product Group at SmartBear.

    It’s good to reiterate that this study examined a handful of leading apps from each industry. So, these scores shouldn’t be construed as inclusive of the entire app marketplace, only as benchmarks for the top mobile app performers.

  • 5 Reasons Why Your App Needs an Error Monitoring System

    5 Reasons Why Your App Needs an Error Monitoring System

    All software applications have errors. Bugs are simply part of software development. That’s why engineering organizations need to know exactly what errors are occurring so decisions can be made around which bugs to fix.

    The fastest way to identify and fix application errors is to implement error monitoring software. However, not all solutions are created equal, and the best error monitoring systems do more than error alerting. They provide insights into the stability of the software, give developers metrics for addressing technical debt and enable better decision making around building features versus fixing bugs.

    The result? Happier developers who build better apps that match customer expectations.

    Here are five specific reasons why engineering organizations should adopt an error monitoring system.

    Error Monitoring Improves Application Health

    At its core, an error monitoring system addresses the challenge to find, fix and prioritize software bugs. However, what makes an error monitoring solution stand out is stability scores, which make it easier to maintain a healthy app.

    • Calculated with real-time error rates and session data, stability scores reflect the percentage of successful user interactions per release. 
    • They tell the real story about the impact of errors and technical debt and provide a single, unifying metric that speaks directly to the overall application health.
    • Stability scores can be used across teams to set stability targets (critical stability and target stability), which in turn can determine whether the app is healthy enough for building new features, or if it’s time to fix bugs.

    An Error Monitoring Solution Increases Team Productivity

    With a lack of detailed information about the source and factors contributing to a bug or crash, developers must conduct research to pinpoint errors, which is a time-intensive process.

    Without Error Monitoring With Error Monitoring
    Sixty percent of developer time wasted investigating and fixing errors, often in code they didn’t write. Forty percent increase in developer productivity with the exact location and source of the error provided by error monitoring solution.

    From detection to resolution, error monitoring with stability scores determines whether debugging needs to be part of the workload and which errors should be addressed first. In addition, the best error monitoring tools help prioritize business-critical and revenue-impacting errors to ensure alignment from top to bottom within an organization.

    Understanding Your Application Errors Can Reduce Costs and Increase Revenue

    With an error monitoring service that catches errors quickly, engineers save time, avoid critical errors and deliver crash-free applications that users want to spend money on. New features can also be rolled out on time with fewer errors, which makes developers and users happy. 

    • On average, companies lose $1,500 per engineer each month over debugging.
    • Knight Capital Group lost $440 million in a mere 30 minutes due to a software bug.

    Technical issues are the number one reason apps get deleted. Thankfully, companies that deliver smooth app experiences benefit from loyal users who trust and spend money on their brand.

    Error Monitoring Retains Development Talent and Boosts Morale

    Technical debt is hard on engineers, both from a productivity and emotional perspective. Without a common language to explain its impact to other teams, developers often become frustrated at bearing the burden of technical debt, which can cause disengagement and encourage developers to leave.

    Error monitoring management and stability scores bring complete visibility and cross-team agreement around software stability and prioritization of errors. Stability scores provide:

    • A common vernacular for discussion between engineering, product, QA and release teams about when it’s time to fix bugs versus build new features.
    • A metrics-driven reflection of the impact of technical debt on the product and clear demonstration about when it’s time to address it.
    • A singular goal for application stability, which turns development and product teams into allies and increases morale across the organization.

    Error Handling Impacts User Satisfaction and Usage, and Safeguards App Store Ratings

    Apps play an important role in our personal and professional lives. Widespread app adoption and daily usage point to why application errors are becoming unacceptable to users, who aren’t shy about speaking up when errors do occur. 

    • Ninety- six percent of mobile app users write bad reviews for sub-par apps.
    • Forty-two percent of 0-star app ratings in the Google Play Store mention app stability and bugs.

    The best way to ensure users have a positive customer experience is to use error monitoring to catch errors in real-time so you can respond immediately. Error monitoring provides a hope for avoiding poor app store ratings and for keeping customers satisfied.