Mobile App Analytics

Chapter 3. Real User Experience

This chapter focuses on metrics that help you to understand the usability and stability of your app. Measuring the performance and response time of your mobile app helps to pinpoint slowly reacting user actions. Collecting and reviewing fatal program crashes is one of the fundamental activities for improving upcoming app versions. Reducing the overall number of app crashes also means decreasing the churn rate of your customers and improving the reliability of your native mobile apps.

One of the most important requirements for mobile apps is to guarantee a high degree of usability by fulfilling essential functionality for your users. Your mobile app has to offer enough stickiness so that the users continue to use it over a longer period of time. Each user evaluates many different apps in a very short time, but may only keep a few.

That said, it is obvious that your app’s usability and reliability play a major role, not only for increasing its Lifetime Value (LTV), but also for acquiring new users, as negative user reviews within the global marketplaces have an immediate effect.

Most of the mobile analytics solutions are able to visualize the negative effect of increased app crashes on user acquisition numbers. Figure 3-1 shows that for that specific app there was a slight decrease of crash-free users around July 8th, which could be the reason for a slight decrease of daily new user acquisitions two days later, around July 10th. You can easily test ...