If your software often fails, keeping any consumer happy is nearly impossible. According to research, most Android app users can only stand an average daily crash rate of 0.25 percent. Lesser retention rates often equate to lower revenue.
Here are some consequences you should be aware of if you’re still unclear about how a mobile app’s instability affects income generation:
1. Negligible memory skills
Proper memory management, in particular, is frequently difficult for developers to achieve in enterprise-scale systems.
High memory utilisation is one of the main causes of performance problems and memory warnings in programmes. In severe circumstances, these performance problems result in the app ceasing to function.
The first step is to end highly utilised programmes when a mobile device OS needs extra memory to complete operations. Your software can find up on the OS’s blacklist if it continuously consumes a lot of memory. The user experience is certain to suffer greatly under such situations.
Poor memory management in your mobile app may be caused by a variety of circumstances. Retain cycles and erroneous cache utilisation are at the top of the list. Without the right setup and sizing, cache utilisation may quickly increase and consume available memory.
On the other hand, a retention cycle is initiated when two objects with strong reference points approach one another. Only after the programme is closed may the items in the retain cycle be freed.
Only loading memory items (big photos, etc.) when necessary is one approach to get around these problems. This decreases screen load times, improves performance, and helps prevent crashes. Additionally, you can take other actions, such as releasing non-compressed memory objects in response to a memory alert.
2. Insufficient Testing
Without extensive testing, it is hard to provide your consumers with a solid and dependable software. It’s crucial to regularly test your app in order to eliminate or drastically reduce the possibility of it crashing. While doing this, keep in mind that testing quality is just as crucial as testing frequency. In order to test your app properly, you usually need to run it in numerous different scenarios.
This can entail testing it across various networks, platforms, gadgets, resolutions, and orientations. You’ll have the opportunity to spot and keep an eye on the problems and bugs that eventually jeopardise the stability of your software during this procedure.
Testing an app feature by feature is a typical mistake made by developers. To encounter these problems firsthand before the user does is the major goal of testing. By doing this, you can prevent unexpected behaviour from occurring in the first place. We propose strong solutions like Shake if you want to organise your testing completely and effectively.
These solutions provide efficient crash-reporting features that allow you monitor the problems with your app in real-time and also instantly patch defects.
3. Handling errors and exceptions
Given how challenging mobile development may be, a certain amount of mistakes or exceptions are inevitable. No matter how thorough your testing cycles may have been, occasionally a memory problem, network issue, or unexpected API update may go unnoticed.
Only efficient error and exception management can stop a crash under such circumstances. In general, when the calling code of an app runs into an incorrect state, an exception is a sort of object that may be introduced in some circumstances.
The execution path of the code in your application is then changed by the exception object. However, it is also commonly known that exceptions can result in faulty application states and app failures.
Both iOS (Objective-C) and Android (Java) have specific exception handling frameworks or procedures to combat this. When a process enters an exception path, exception handlers employ a clear hierarchy to make sure your programme is ready.
When done correctly, they make sure that your app’s processes don’t shut down, which would result in the app crashing. Handling exceptions as they arise may not be sufficient as a best practise for mobile development.
To anticipate and stop upcoming mistakes and exceptions, try leveraging the testing answers and existing exception history. New Mobile is one of the more intriguing technologies we’ve found for handling this.
4. Extraordinary Code
If you haven’t already thought about it, creating too much code may also contribute to your app’s instability. The fact that there is more code doesn’t always mean that it is better code or has more functionality.
The best way to write code is to make it straightforward. The majority of the time, the more code you have, the more errors you’ll encounter. One of your best bets for preventing crashes in your programme may be to remove extraneous code.
To make your code as light as possible, you should concentrate on the following areas:
- Functionality is your top goal as a developer while producing an application. Functional programming also minimises the inclusion of dependencies in the majority of cases.
- Dependencies aren’t always bad, but any mistake along the chain results in a series-circuit effect. Your code’s modularity will suffer as a result.
- Nomenclature: You should always optimise names because they are a crucial part of your code.
- Long names with needless details just result in extra code, while acronyms that are too short make things challenging for upcoming developers.
- Avoiding repetition is another simple technique to make your code lightweight. If you see a pattern in your code, it’s possible that a similar concept already exists in a different class, function, or method.
- In these situations, you should refactor your code to take into consideration steady execution and the expansion of the codebase. Refactoring is the term for this.
- Though it’s a quick and simple solution, there are valid arguments against constantly making your code public. Your code becomes easily available when it exists as a global state.
- This frequently implies that you could have to handle unexpected changes brought on by other parties.
- Clean, functional code should always be a goal if you want to maintain your programme as crash-free as possible.
5. Incompatibility with Devices
Additionally, if your app is incompatible with a user’s device, your app may crash on that user’s device. One of the biggest challenges you’ll have as a mobile developer is the fact that you’re creating apps to run in situations that could be outside of your control.
Unfortunately, this issue is made considerably more difficult by Android smartphones. Android working conditions are far less restricted by Apple than the iOS development environment, where everything is rigorously regulated.
The Android ecosystem has long been plagued by fragmentation, and developers always seem to bear the brunt of it. Over 24,000 different Android smartphones were in use globally as of 2015. You’ll still have to deal with many OS versions in addition to the extremely fragmented hardware from various vendors.
It’s critical that you optimise your app for Android as they control 71.81% of the mobile market share. The reality is that it may be unrealistic to keep up with all the gadget and OS updates.
Google advises focusing on the most recent OS version and supporting at least 90% of all active devices. You may support several API versions without adding extra code by integrating the Android Support Library into your project.
6. Network Problems
Cloud computing has gained widespread popularity in recent years for pretty apparent reasons. The mobile development industry has also embraced this evolution.
However, because of their constant use of cloud services, iOS and Android apps are now vulnerable to network issues. Network problems now account for 20% of all mobile app crashes since they are such a significant impact in programme stability. That’s a rather astounding sum!
When your programme tries to access data via a network or from other third-party services, it encounters certain network management problems. In these circumstances, if network connectivity is erratic, the programme might quickly end as it waits for a response.
These problems might also be brought on by network changes (such as the switch from 3G to 4G or a loss of reception in outlying locations). It could also have something to do with how much network bandwidth your software is able to use.
You could choose to provide the user with an offline version of the programme if the problem is transient and beyond of your control. As an alternative, you may guide them to a specific course of action that they might find interesting.
The sole option for internet-dependent applications like Instagram or Twitter may be to show the most current version of the programme that has been downloaded.
Lifecycle of Software Development, or 7.
Another frequent reason for crashes in mobile apps is improper management of your application’s lifecycle events. The fundamental lifetime of an app often consists of a hierarchy or series of events and activities that occur between the time an activity is started and when it is shut down.
These events could have callbacks like “onCreate(),” “onPause(),” and “onDestroy()” attached to them. There are stage-specific challenges at every level that may jeopardise the stability of your software.
However, problems with Mobile Application Lifecycle Management (MALM) typically fall into one or more of these groups: compliance, security, or privacy.
Experience has shown us that defining the correct order of these lifecycle events and responding correctly to any possible difficulties associated with them are essential to finding solutions to these challenges. You must use flags that eliminate any opportunity for assumption in order to track the important application states in order to do this.
These flags assist the programme in determining when specific crucial events have taken place.Your programme can only go on to the following event in the sequence if the present flag has been verified as true.
Poorly managed app lifecycles can be identified by excessive resource usage even when the programme is not being used, app switch-related problems, or the loss of user progress while changing the display orientation.
8. Data Containment
Your app constantly requests to utilise shared database resources as part of its operations and activities.
These resources may include memory for processing, storage, or a network. In some cases, the availability of these shared resources may be insufficient to meet demand. Contention over databases or resources results from this.
When a database receives numerous requests for the same resource at once, only one of the requests is granted access while the others are queued up behind it.
As a result, the software performs poorly since it can only complete a small amount of user work. In rare instances, the app entirely shuts off.
They frequently seem to be repaired only to reappear when performance demands are high. When troubleshooting, the first step in fixing this kind of problem is to pinpoint its contention-related nature. There is a significant setback, though.
Contention problems have been tougher to detect as cloud technologies and virtual environments have grown more widely used. Resource conflict can now happen at different points and in different dynamic situations.
To prioritise them and allow access depending on business needs, you must first identify the competing transactions or processes.
