Tuesday 20 May 2014

Honey App Don't Care...(netofeverything.blogspot.com.br)


Pop quiz: Your development team is developing a new mobile application. Should they optimize it for use over a mobile network or over WiFi?

Another way to ask that same question is, "Should they provide a great quality of experience for users over a mobile network or over WiFi?

And yet another way to ask that same question is, "Should I improve productivity for some of my users, but decrease productivity for others?"

This is one of those situations in which you find yourself that you simply can't win. No choice is optimal because no matter what you choose, someone is losing - and perhaps losing big. And no matter what choice you make, the business loses - whether in terms of the time and money associated with productivity or in sales associated with customers.

The reality is that Honey App Don't Care. And that's the way it should be. The application developer shouldn't be concerned about such things as TCP congestion or how FEC (Forward Error Correction) might impact the performance of their application. The developer shouldn't have to worry about that, because it's all network-related, and therefore relative to individual users at varying times.

The application, anyway, can't really do much to influence performance when the problem is deep inside the network stack, anyway. It can't reach down into the TCP stack and tune it for the network its currently connecting over - even if it could determine whether it's using WiFi or mobile networks.
The app don't are, and so someone has to because while the app doesn't care, the user does - about performance. According to a Compuware report, "Mobile Apps: What Consumers Really Need and Want": "Users expect mobile apps to launch not just quickly, but faster than mobile versions of websites. 78 percent expect mobile apps to load as fast as — or faster than — a mobile website."

Note that within that expectation there's no "over a WiFi connection" or "on a mobile network." They just expect a mobile app to load at least as well as, if not better, the mobile website. And mobile app performance, in general, is "somewhat or very important" to 84 percent of users.

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