The term quality is often thrown around to describe any sort of product or service. In that sense, quality can mean a lot of things. If we’re considering quality to be how fast or easy-to-use a mobile app is then it gets a bit complicated because apps come in all shapes and sizes. Some apps attempt to do everything you need, while others focus on a single function and try to do it well. In this guide, we'll talk about why app quality is important and how you can improve the performance, stability, testing, and usability of your mobile app.
The way that we define app quality here is the fitness of the app for its intended use. Factors that affect app quality include performance, stability, testing, and usability, and these all come down to the end user experience. Some performance and stability considerations include: Is it loading fast enough? Is it draining the battery? Is it crashing constantly? Rigorous testing ensures that an app performs well, is stable, and is usable. And finally, high quality apps need to be user-friendly. Regardless of what the ultimate function of the app is, users need to be able to interact with the app with ease.
To be able to assess mobile app quality, you can use a common set of quantifiable metrics to compare apps against each other, or to compare how a single app's quality has changed over time.
With the abundance of mobile apps available, especially the number of apps that claim to perform the same function, users are more sensitive to app quality as a differentiator when deciding which app to use. When users are selecting between five apps that all do the same thing, they probably won't choose to use the apps that crash, are slow, and are not regularly updated with bug fixes and performance improvements.
Mobile app quality can be broken down into four equally important areas:
Application performance monitoring measures the technical aspects of your mobile app’s quality. Bad performance can make a mobile app unusable and users won’t hesitate to delete it. Here are a few key aspects of performance:
This is in essence how reliable your app is. If an app is behaving the way that it should, then it’s considered stable. App stability is commonly associated with crashes and errors. While it’s almost impossible to avoid any crashes or errors, how often they occur is the measure of your app’s stability, which in turn affects its quality.
This is crucial in order to prevent unhandled errors and catch issues before they get released into production. Integrating strong testing early on in an app’s life cycle can save a lot of headaches and resources down the line.
This refers to how the user interacts with your mobile application. If a user finds it difficult to use your app, they are more likely to remove it and leave a bad review. When it comes to app quality, here are a few key usability aspects you should prioritize:
In an ideal world, every mobile team would want to make their app the highest quality possible. In reality, we are faced with resource allocation constraints, whether that is time, money, or engineering capacity. Compromising your app’s quality in favor of something else comes with a lot of consequences. Here are some of the key reasons why you should avoid releasing a low-quality app at all costs:
A study of apps on the Play Store shows that 50% of one-star reviews mentioned app stability. Excessive battery usage, slow render times, and crashes were among the key sources of frustration. Higher quality apps are more discoverable in the app stores than similar apps of lower quality and tend to have more users and fewer uninstalls.
Mobile apps are not cheap to develop and maintain. And generating enough user interest and daily active users (DAU) to increase revenue streams is a huge challenge. Let’s take a look at what low app quality means for your business bottom line.
While an app is in development, the cost of not fixing a bug is multiplied during the different phases of the software development lifecycle, according to IBM:
After an app is released, the consequences of avoiding fixing app crashes and bugs early on negatively impacts all areas of the business, including:
The reasons to avoid having a low-quality app are clear, but since every app is different, how do you know what metrics to measure? When it comes to stability and performance there are a couple of standard industry benchmarks that you should always aim to meet.
Getting users to download your app is a big enough challenge, but getting them to stay is an even bigger one. If users experience any crashes, delays, or bugs, they're likely to delete your app altogether. If your app is unstable or slow, it won't be successful. In this section, we will cover how you can use Instabug to improve your app quality and make your users happy.
View your app's performance from your users' perspective with built-for-mobile performance monitoring that tackles the unique challenges of the mobile experience. Instabug's APM aligns your team around a single overall metric that reflects your app performance and helps you build a culture of performance for your team.
With each report, you automatically receive comprehensive data to help fix issues faster, including steps to reproduce errors, network request and console logs, and environment details. For bug reporting, your beta testers can also send screen recordings and annotate screenshots to provide further context.
Collect user feedback from your beta testers right inside your app to minimize interruptions and boost participation rates. Get powerful insights to enhance your product roadmap with surveys that you can target at specific tester segments and feature request voting to understand user pain points and desires.
Capture all your app's sessions and watch visual replays to see through your users' eyes. Instabug captures a series of screenshots along with all the events, actions, logs, and more, allowing you to quickly understand the issue, what's causing it, and how to fix it without wasting your time on needless back-and-forth questions. Additionally, you can ensure user privacy out of the box with customizable levels of auto-masking to protect sensitive information.
Instabug empowers mobile teams to maintain industry-leading apps with mobile-focused, user-centric stability and performance monitoring.
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