When it comes to mobile apps, performance is important: If the app loads or updates too slowly, people are likely to stop using it.
Google engineers discovered that if it takes more than 400 milliseconds – literally the blink of an eye — for your computer to respond to a click on a website or a tap on a keyboard, it is too long. And if a site loads too slowly, even by seconds on whatever device the information is requested, customers will go elsewhere.
Similarly, a study conducted by leading Web traffic controller Akamai Technologies revealed that a poorly designed website loses a full 30 percent of its customers within a few seconds. The same study also found that if a site takes longer than four seconds to load, 75 percent of viewers wouldn’t bother to return to it.
These findings can easily be transferred to mobile apps. The lesson learned is that your product or service could be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if nobody is motivated to look at your app long enough because their mobile device doesn’t perform well enough, then it really doesn’t matter how good it is.
Forrester Research shows in the report ‘Mobile Is The New Face Of Engagement’ that business spending on mobile projects will grow 100% by 2015. More than half of business decision-makers will increase their mobile apps budget as they look for better ways to engage with customers and partners. Organisations not only need to provide apps to capture this substantial market opportunity, but also to meet consumer expectations.
But, developing a mobile app that is truly real-time is a challenge. Businesses need to offer their mobile customers a high quality of service and a first-class customer experience regardless of Internet connectivity, bandwidth availability, location or device. How is it possible to deliver a true real-time solution across the Internet when mobile networks are slow and connections fail?
The answer is that organisations will need to identify ways to reduce the data sent over the network infrastructure, and prioritise which part of the data needs to be sent first.
The mobile app needs to be able to manage the session state, re-connecting a lost mobile connection and then only send the deltas of the information missed since the disconnection.
If it is able to understand the context of the data, the app can then only send the latest data – removing “out of date” or “stale messages” from the client queue. This approach not only makes more efficient use of the available bandwidth and infrastructure required, but also with information up to date to the millisecond, it also delivers a truly immersive real-time end user experience.
The technology to support this kind of clever data distribution is already available. Now it's time for organisations to look at how they optimise their mobile apps. If they don't, users will eventually go elsewhere.
By Sean Bowen, CEO at Push Technology.
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