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.
Forrester Research shows in the report ‘Mobile Is The New Face Of Engagement’ that business spending on mobile projects will grow 100% by 2015.
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.
Mobile Business to Grow
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?
Prioritise
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.
Rather than develop separately for the dozens of smartphones and tablets in the market, the trick is to find a single solution designed to get you to market quickly by supporting all devices in the market today and in the future. This is not only more financially viable but saves on development costs while supporting devices beyond Android and Apple. Not only that but development savings will be replicated as new devices are introduced to the market, and a high quality user experience is also maintained.
It’s important to manage the context of the data required to drive your interactive services, connecting to clients intelligently by selecting the fastest possible transport protocol supported, and then managing the session state, re-connecting lost connections and then only sending the deltas of the information missed since the disconnection.
The ability to understand the context of the data means only sending the latest data – removing “out of date” or “stale messages” from the client queue. This makes more efficient use of the available bandwidth and infrastructure required and delivers a truly immersive real-time end user experience.
The Customer is King
In our busy, dynamic, real-time world where competitive battles are won in milliseconds, having the most up to date data delivered to mobile devices, leaves no room for error. Not only that, but the focus of your finite and valuable IT resources should be on innovation and even adding new services. It should not be swallowing up valuable time and effort ensuring that your website or trading platform is performing on all appropriate mobile devices.
Time spent developing for mobile devices today, is competitive edge being eroded and attention diverted from your precious customers.
To disregard the need for real-time data on all mobile devices, is not only ignoring a present market opportunity, but that of your future success too. In fact, failure to act now, while the mobile dilemma reaches its peak, may quickly damage the prosperity and agility of your business tomorrow.
