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  • 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.

  • SmartBear Adds Enterprise-grade Application Stability and Error Monitoring with Acquisition of Bugsnag

    Bugsnag will join the SmartBear portfolio of quality tools including TestComplete, ReadyAPI, Zephyr, SwaggerHub, CrossBrowserTesting, and BitBar

    SOMERVILLE, Mass. and SAN FRANCISCO — April 28, 2021 — SmartBear, a leading provider of software development and quality tools, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire application stability management pioneer, Bugsnag.

    Bugsnag’s best-in-class, full-stack stability and error monitoring technology is leveraged by industry leaders like Airbnb, Slack, Lyft, and more than 6,000 organizations that prioritize application stability and health in order to continuously deliver high quality software. The addition of Bugsnag further bolsters an award-winning SmartBear offering that supports quality-first initiatives across every aspect of software delivery.

    “We are thrilled to add Bugsnag to our portfolio of market-leading solutions,” said Frank Roe, CEO of SmartBear. “SmartBear solutions cover the critical areas of design, development, test management and automation, and Bugsnag adds app stability in production environments to our full span of SDLC coverage. This addition amplifies our rapid growth we’ve seen over the past few years and solidifies the position of SmartBear as the first choice for millions of developers and software teams around the globe.”

    “We’re incredibly excited for this new chapter for our company because with the backing of SmartBear we will be able to continue to address the soaring demand for stable, high quality applications,” said James Smith, co-founder and CEO of Bugsnag. “Bugsnag and SmartBear share a common mission to help software teams accelerate the delivery of high quality software, so this coming together is a no-brainer for us and our customers.”

    “An accelerated shift to DevOps, among other existing digital transformation initiatives, has really taken off over the past year,” said Vineeta Puranik, SVP of Engineering at SmartBear. “Those shifts require testing to be performed earlier and by developers alongside testers. Bugsnag empowers development teams to make data-driven decisions around app quality, and the solution’s ease of use and seamless integrations make it a perfect fit for the SmartBear portfolio.”

    The acquisition comes after record, double-digit growth for SmartBear last year as well as the company securing a significant investment from Vista Equity Partners in October. Vista is an investor alongside Francisco Partners, which acquired SmartBear in 2017.

    The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions.

    About Bugsnag

    Bugsnag is a pioneer in application stability management. We make error monitoring actionable and help enterprises and small businesses stabilize, prioritize and fix bugs. As a full stack solution, we are recognized for our best-in-class support for mobile applications. Bugsnag empowers software development, client observability and release management teams to make data-driven decisions on when to build features versus fix bugs.

    Organizations experience significant ROI due to faster innovation led by developer efficiencies and improved customer experiences. We process over 1 billion crash reports every day from applications worldwide and more than 6,000 industry leading brands including Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, Lyft, Yelp and Pandora use Bugsnag as their daily dashboard. Based in San Francisco, Bugsnag is backed by GV (Google Ventures), Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners. For more information, visit www.bugsnag.com.

    About SmartBear
    At SmartBear, we focus on your one priority that never changes: quality. We know delivering quality software over and over is complicated. So our tools are built to streamline your process while seamlessly working with the products you use – and will use. Whether it’s TestComplete, Swagger, Cucumber, ReadyAPI, Zephyr, or one of our other tools, we span from test automation, API design, collaboration, performance testing, test management, and more. Whichever you need, they’re easy to try, easy to buy, and easy to integrate. We’re used by 15 million developers, testers, and operations engineers at 24,000+ organizations – including world-renowned innovators like Adobe, JetBlue, FedEx, and Microsoft. Wherever you’re going, we’ll help you get there. Learn more at smartbear.com, or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

    All trademarks recognized.

  • Bugsnag Announces Inaugural Application Stability Index Report, Reveals Mobile and Web Apps Fall Short of Stability “Five Nines”

    Findings illustrate the need for superior application stability for improved customer experience and retention

    SAN FRANCISCO — Bugsnag Inc., an application stability management pioneer, today announced the results of its Application Stability Index: Are your Apps Healthy? report analyzed the performance of approximately 2,500 top mobile and web applications (by session volume) within its customer base. The report reveals the median stability of mobile applications is 99.63%, while the median stability of web applications came in at 99.39%. These findings indicate almost four out of every 1000 customers could be having a completely broken experience with a mobile application. Similar to the “five nines” (99.999%) that infrastructure and operations teams use to measure uptime and availability, this benchmark will help development teams make decisions about when to build features versus fix bugs based on the application’s current stability.

    “With more consumers using online apps, providing an error-free experience is of utmost importance to drive consumer engagement and retention,” said James Smith, CEO of Bugsnag. “To help engineering teams understand the stability and reliability of their apps, we’ve compiled data on the session-based stability of leading mobile and web applications across market segments to set a benchmark for app health. Engineering teams are always striving to innovate, and we’re dedicated to helping them achieve app stability excellence to deliver a better customer experience, drive loyalty and business growth.”

    Measuring and Improving Application Stability for Mobile-First Engineering Organizations

    Compared to the 99.999% industry target for most IT infrastructure groups, also known as “five nines,” a median stability of 99.63% presents a significant opportunity for engineering organizations to invest in measuring and improving application stability and customer experience.

    STABILITY SCORE BY TYPE OF MOBILE DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM
    Platform Android iOS React
    Native    		 Unity
    75th percentile 99.97% 99.94% 99.88% 100%
    Median 99.69% 99.72% 99.40% 99.96%
    25th percentile 98.87% 98.94% 97.83% 99.43%

    The report includes application data from several mobile development platforms, including Android, iOS, React Native, and Unity, as well as several front-end development platforms, including Angular, Backbone, Ember, React, and Vue. Key findings include:

    • Android and iOS native applications tend to have a higher median stability as specialized developers working on these applications have the expertise required to understand and address stability issues effectively.
    • Android applications tend to have a slightly lower median stability compared to iOS applications. As Android presents a much less constrained development environment due to increasing device fragmentation compared to iOS, it is inherently more difficult for Android development teams to test their applications.
    • React Native has a slightly lower median stability than the other mobile development platforms. Although it allows engineering teams to develop for iOS and Android together, expertise in these platforms is needed to effectively investigate and fix bugs in the native layers of the code.
    • Unity applications boast the highest median stability score. The isolated testing environment of Unity applications makes it less likely that a bug will crash the entire application.
    • Web applications have a lower median stability compared to mobile applications, indicating modern web development frameworks may provide more resources to manage errors.
    • There is correlation between size of the engineering team and median stability scores. The smaller the engineering team, the lower the median stability. This holds true in teams up to 50 engineers as achieving product-market fit is more important than app stability. However, large teams of 100+ engineers working on more mature applications experience challenges such as legacy code, compounding technical debt and complexity of team structure that result in declining stability scores.

    “Although stability is commonly a KPI owned by engineering organizations, it has a significant impact on overall business performance and growth,” said Smith. “Engineering organizations can no longer separate business metrics from the stability of their applications — they must standardize error monitoring and stability solutions across the stack and across multiple teams.”

    Bugsnag is meeting this challenge head on and enabling teams to measure and improve app stability, so organizations can increase competitive advantage and drive business growth.

    About the Bugsnag Stability Index Report:

    The Bugsnag Stability Index Report is based on actual customer sessions and 30-day stability assessments patterns that were analyzed and scored by the Bugsnag Application Stability Management platform in 2020. For more information, please visit: www.bugsnag.com/research/2020-application-stability-index-report

    About Bugsnag

    Bugsnag is a pioneer in application stability management. We make error monitoring actionable and help enterprises and small businesses stabilize, prioritize and fix bugs. As a full stack solution, we are recognized for our best-in-class support for mobile applications. Bugsnag empowers software development, client observability and release management teams to make data-driven decisions on when to build features versus fix bugs.

    Organizations experience significant ROI due to faster innovation led by developer efficiencies and improved customer experiences. We process over 1 billion crash reports every day from applications worldwide and more than 5,000 industry leading brands including Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, Lyft, Yelp and Pandora use Bugsnag as their daily dashboard. Based in San Francisco, Bugsnag is backed by GV (Google Ventures), Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners. For more information, visit www.bugsnag.com.