Application optimization company PacketZoom launched a new benchmark for mobile application performance and end-user experience, relying on data compiled from networks around the world.
The benchmark is meant to be a guide for app developers who want to take into account mobile app performance across different geographies and networks around the world, from 2G to LTE and Wi-Fi. The data was gathered from users in each country during October.
PacketZoom CEO Shlomi Gian said software is deployed in dozens of apps on tens of millions of devices all over the world. Gian joined the company in October, having previously led content delivery network company Akamai’s mobile app market development business. As a by-product of its app optimization solution, Gian said, PacketZoom generates a lot of data on various networks around the world and how apps are performing on them. PacketZoom decided to make some of this data publicly available through its Mobile Observatory. The stats reflect user experience in terms of packet loss, latency, response and transfer time during app sessions, as well as when an app session fully disconnects.
Gian said that while latency is frequently a concern in app performance, “this is only part of the equation. The other part no one is talking about … because they think there is nothing we can do about it.”
That part, he said, is the disconnection rate when an app session is completely disrupted (a TCP connection is dropped) by a device changing networks or moving in and out of coverage, or when a connection times out. Gian noted that some countries can perform well in certain metrics but poorly in others that impact the app experience. In India, for example, PacketZoom found there is average packet loss of only about 2.8% within app sessions – but within 2G network coverage, app session disconnects are at 21.5% and at 13.4% on 3G networks.
Such insights about end-user experience can give game developers a more complete picture about competitive position, Gian said, such as adoption rates in different parts of the world, and whether different regions have networks that are up to supporting an app that requires low latency.
Among the global mobile app stats from PacketZoom:
- The countries with the best response times for mobile apps were France at 276 milliseconds for a round-trip between the mobile app and content server; Spain at 338 ms; and the Netherlands at 355 ms.
- The countries with the highest averages of disconnections during an app session were India (9.3%), Indonesia (8.1%) and France (7.9%).
- In the U.S., PacketZoom found 3.9% of mobile app sessions were impacted by network disconnections. Japan had the least disconnects with just 2.8% of app sessions disrupted. South Korea had the second-best metric at 3.4%.
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