Mobile users expect their apps to be fast and responsive, and apps with a slow startup time, especially during coldstart, can leave them feeling frustrated. Firebase Performance Monitoring is a tool that helps you gain insight about various app quality signals, including startup time of your application. This article gives a deep dive into the Firebase Performance Monitoring tool and its impact during an Android application’s cold start.
Modern Android applications perform multiple operations until the application becomes responsive to the user. “Startup time” of an application measures the time between when an application icon is tapped on the device screen, to when the application is responsive. Code executing during startup time includes the application's code, along with code from dependencies that are involved in app startup. Any code that executes until the first frame is drawn is reflected in the time to initial display metric.
Many libraries do not need to get initialized during the application startup phase. Some libraries, like Firebase Performance Monitoring, provide value by initializing during the startup phase. It is this early initialization that enables measurement of app start, CPU/Memory impact during early phases of startup, and performance of network requests during application startup. But, this could lead to an increase in the startup time of the application.
You can measure the impact of a library during your app’s startup by creating 2 versions of your app (with and w/o the library) and measuring the “time between Application launch to Activity firstFrameDrawn” in both to compare.
Firebase Performance Monitoring performs the following tasks during an application cold start:
Firebase Performance Monitoring does all these without developers needing to add any lines of code to their application.
There are many tools available to profile the performance of an application. We used the following tools for measuring the startup time and analyzing the impact of every single method in our library during application cold start.
Macrobenchmark is a recent tool launched at Google I/O '21 to measure the startup and runtime performance of your application on physical devices. We used this tool to measure the overall time taken by an application during a cold start.
Method tracing enables understanding all the classes/methods that were involved in the runtime of an application. This lists down the different methods that get executed at runtime and the duration each method takes for execution. Due to the overhead of method tracing, the duration of methods as specified in the trace file is bloated. Nonetheless, this duration can be used as a guiding metric to understand the impact of a method.
Using the method tracing APIs, we identified multiple opportunities within the application’s lifecycle events to reduce the impact of the library during application startup, including:
We optimized the library in all these phases. Some key optimizations include:
To benchmark the impact of Firebase Performance Monitoring, we built a simple Android application. Benchmarking performance depends on various factors. To make this measurement close to user needs, we measured the startup time with the following factors.
We ran the application with and without Firebase performance library to understand the startup time impact caused by the library. We used macrobenchmark to measure the duration of the startup time.
For an empty application with the above ground conditions, the table below captures the impact of the application startup before and after the optimizations.
With all the above changes, we have been able to reduce the impact of the library during startup time by more than 35%.
Application startup time improvement is a moving target for all developers. Though device hardware has been dramatically improving in recent years, the challenge of improved startup time performance continues to push barriers. We are continuously investing in reducing the startup time impact.
Update your Firebase Performance Monitoring SDK to the recent version to get these recent improvements on startup time, realtime metrics and alerts.
This article is part of the weekly learning pathways we’re releasing leading up to Firebase Summit. See the full pathway and register for the summit here.
Apps and games have evolved rapidly in recent years, and user expectations for high performing apps have increased right alongside them. Today’s users don’t just demand speed and performance — they reward it. A 2019 study found that retail sites saw 8% more conversions when they reduced their mobile site load times by one-tenth of a second. And travel sites boosted conversions by just over 10%.
Pinpointing an app’s performance issues can be challenging, especially when the culprit is slow network requests from your dependencies or even your own server.
This is where network analysis from Firebase Performance Monitoring can help. Firebase Performance Monitoring helps you understand your app’s performance from the user’s perspective in near real time. You can analyze the performance of each module of your app by monitoring response times, success rates, and payload sizes of your most critical network requests.
Let’s look at how we were able to spot performance pitfalls in BingoBlast - Firebase's very own demo app.
Out-of-the-box, Firebase Performance Monitoring measures each network request that is sent from your app. To surface the most important trends from the vast number of URLs, Firebase automatically aggregates data for similar network requests to representative URL patterns. Furthermore, this aggregation removes all PII (Personal Identifiable Information) such as home address, username, and password so that developers don't need to worry about leaking user information.
Firebase displays all URL patterns (including custom URL patterns) and their aggregated data in the Network requests subtab of the traces table, which is the lower half of the Performance dashboard.
BingoBlast Auto Aggregate Data.
By just integrating Firebase Performance Monitoring into your app, you can quickly see the slowest network requests your app is making and how that performance has changed over time.
For BingoBlast, our traces table shows that some network requests have substantial slowdowns in their response time over the past several days, signaling that there might already be issues needing our attention.
Although Firebase does a great job at automatically generating URL patterns, at times the specific pattern you're interested in might be hidden under an automated pattern. In those situations, you can create custom URL patterns to monitor specific URL patterns that Firebase isn't capturing with its derived automatic URL pattern matching.
Custom URL patterns let you specify the patterns that will take precedence over the automatic URL patterns. With custom URL patterns, you can:
A custom URL pattern consists of the hostname followed by path segments. Subdomains and path segments can be replaced with a * to represent matching with any string.
*
If a request's URL matches more than one custom URL pattern, Firebase Performance Monitoring maps the request to the most specific custom URL pattern based on left-to-right specificity. See the documentation for the full details and syntax available.
For example, suppose you configure two custom URL patterns:
example.com/books/* example.com/*/dog
A request to example.com/books/dog will match against example.com/books/* because book is more specific than *.
example.com/books/dog
example.com/books/*
book
To show how custom URL patterns can be helpful, let's look closer at the data from BingoBlast. Let's say that we're worried that an important configuration API request (api.redhotlabs.com/1.2/config.get) might be causing issues in BingoBlast. But, we're unable to find it in our list of automatic network URL patterns. In this case, Firebase Performance Monitoring has aggregated the configuration API request along with a few other API requests into the api.redhotlabs.com/1.2/* URL pattern.
api.redhotlabs.com/1.2/config.get
api.redhotlabs.com/1.2/*
To get better insight into any performance issues this API call might be causing, let's use a custom URL pattern for this specific request.
To do this, we just click the Create custom URL pattern button in the traces table, then enter api.redhotlabs.com/1.2/config.get into the dialog. After the new pattern is created, the traces table will start displaying the new custom URL pattern based on new data.
Creating a new custom URL pattern.
Since this is an important API request and we want to track our improvements to it over time, we can add metrics (like response time) for this new custom URL pattern to our metrics board at the top of the Performance dashboard page. These metrics cards are a great way to provide a quick overview of your most important metrics.
Pin your most important metrics to the top of your dashboard.
With api.redhotlabs.com/1.2/config.get extracted as its own URL pattern, it's easier to monitor for any unwanted changes in the performance of these requests. We can then take action, like removing the request from the app's critical path or recommending improvements for the backend implementation.
Newly added api.redhotlabs.com/1.2/config.get custom URL pattern.
On the other hand, we sometimes want to group related URLs into a single URL pattern. In BingoBlast, we have included a library that plays a short video. However, we noticed that our traces table is showing many separate URL patterns to different googlevideo.com subdomains.
googlevideo.com
Overly precise automated URL patterns for googlevideo.com subdomains.
Since we're more concerned about the overall performance of the video requests, as opposed to which specific subdomain they're from, we can create a custom URL pattern *.googlevideo.com/** to aggregate all these URLs into one pattern. This makes it easy to understand the performance for the video and, as a bonus, makes our traces table more tidy!
*.googlevideo.com/**
Newly aggregated data for the custom URL pattern for googlevideo.com subdomains.
Firebase Performance Monitoring provides a wealth of data on how your users experience your app. By leveraging Firebase’s out-of-the-box automatic URL patterns and tailoring your dashboard with custom URL patterns you’re most interested in, you can easily pinpoint slow performance areas in your apps and quickly boost your app’s responsiveness.
View the full learning pathway for additional codelabs, videos and articles on creating fast and stable apps. And don’t forget to register for Firebase Summit, happening November 10th to learn how Firebase can help you accelerate your app development, release with confidence, and scale with ease!
This is part of a series of articles about app quality. Here is an overview of all the other articles:
Apps and games have evolved rapidly in recent years, and user expectations for high performance have increased right alongside them. Today’s users don’t just demand speed and performance — they reward it. A 2019 study found that retail sites saw 8% more conversions when they reduced their mobile site load times by one-tenth of a second. And travel sites boosted conversions by just over 10%.
As you reach more users across different devices, locations, OS versions, and networks, optimizing performance becomes even more of a moving target. To understand the unique context behind performance issues, you need actionable insights about your app performance from a user's perspective. With performance data that allows you to spend less time putting out fires, you can devote more time to creating delightful experiences knowing that no bug or glitch will slip through the cracks.
With performance data that allows you to spend less time putting out fires, you can devote more time to creating delightful experiences knowing that no bug or glitch will slip through the cracks.
In this article, we’ll explore some Firebase Performance Monitoring features that can help you keep an eye on your app’s performance and understand the experience from a user's point of view.
Real-time app performance metrics
Releasing a new feature that performs well for every user — no matter their location, device, or network speed — can be challenging if you don’t have the timely information you need to gauge performance across a range of variables. When poor performance and low app ratings occur, you need clear insights to deliver an experience worthy of a 5-star review.
Firebase Performance Monitoring processes your app performance data in real time so you can monitor new releases during development and post-launch. For instance, you can gather performance data from Firebase Emulators or virtual devices on Firebase Test Lab to test your app locally before launch. And after launch, you can get insights about metrics related to screen rendering and network requests to learn how your app is performing among different user segments.
By learning how your app responds for different groups of users, you can quickly take action to fix any errors and ensure users won’t delete your app to find one that works better on their device.
Performance Monitoring dashboard highlighting real-time metrics
Customizable Metrics Board
In the first blog post of this series, we highlighted some standard app performance metrics to keep top-of-mind, such as app start-up time, screen rendering performance, and network performance. However, sometimes the influx of real-time data after a big release can feel overwhelming, and identifying where you should focus and take action can be a daunting task.
With the revamped Performance Monitoring dashboard, you can customize your app performance metrics board to highlight the most important metrics for your app. For example, if you’re releasing updates on a shopping app, you can select and track slow-rendering frames on the checkout screens. This helps ensure your customers are enjoying a seamless experience from start to finish. You can also break down your key metrics by country, device, app versions, and OS level for a deeper dive into your performance data.
By learning how quickly your app responds for different groups of users, you can take action to fix latency issues and ensure users won’t delete your app to find one that works better on their device.
Additionally, Performance Monitoring allows you to implement custom code traces, which help monitor the performance of your app between two points in time. You can also create your own traces to capture performance data associated with specific code in your app. For example, you could use custom code traces to measure how long it takes your app to load a set of images and make sure the graphics aren’t causing too much lag.
Compare performance between app versions
Retaining a diverse user base isn’t easy without understanding how specific user segments are engaging with your app — especially when their experience isn’t up to par. To make sure every new release performs at its best once it reaches a large number of users, you can use the new Performance Monitoring dashboard to identify app performance changes that need immediate attention.
The metrics board enables metric performance tracking across versions. If your latest release calls a new API at start-up, you can track latencies in app start time between the latest version of your app and previous versions. The traces table is especially helpful to understand how your traces are trending across selected time ranges. That means you no longer have to wait for app store reviews or support tickets to know when your app performance is lagging.
Performance Monitoring traces table
Track trends, regressions, and severe issues
One of the most important ways to grow and engage your audience is by constantly releasing new features and updates to your app. But any code or configuration changes to your app or any of its many dependencies carry a risk of degrading your app’s performance or causing issues with user experience. For example, if your e-commerce app makes dozens of API calls to fetch your catalog and product details, users might experience frustrating lags during their shopping experience.
By tracking trends and regressions with Performance Monitoring, you can quickly act on the most critical issues and get ahead of low ratings on the app store.
Improve user retention with Performance Monitoring
GameNexa Studios, an India-based app developer, seized an opportunity to invest in improving its app quality when their ad sales were disrupted by COVID-19. By combining Firebase Performance Monitoring and Firebase Crashlytics, the team gained actionable insights about its user base and improved their most popular app’s experience across the board. And by reducing the number of performance issues affecting its users, GameNexa ended up boosting both user retention and session duration, and increased in-app purchases by 2.5X.
Stay ahead of app stability and performance issues
To deliver the fast, consistent experience app that users expect, you need a strategy backed by tools that help you act quickly and fix significant issues on the fly. With detailed, actionable data and insights from Firebase, app developers and product managers can make smarter decisions before launch, tackle urgent issues swiftly after releasing an update, and quickly and confidently roll out new features that keep users coming back.
To get started with Firebase Performance Monitoring, integrate the Performance Monitoring SDK into your app and identify the metrics that matter most to your app’s success.
Posted by the Firebase team
This is an introduction to a three part blog post series on app quality exploring how to unlock app stability and app performance for the optimal app experience. Find links to the other articles at the end of this blog post.
Stability and performance are the core of every successful app. Fast, crash-free experiences encourage users to stay engaged and drive positive reviews. That’s why keeping a close eye on your app’s stability is crucial for competing in today’s thriving app marketplace.
Users expect the best experience every time they interact with an app. And if bugs or latency issues get in the way, they’ll be quick to find a better option. Research has shown 88% of app users will abandon apps based on bugs and glitches. And within that group, 51% of users said they’d abandon an app completely if they experienced one or more bugs per day.
Not only is quality important to retaining users, but it’s important for attracting new users as well. If a large percentage of users are frustrated and your app store listing is filled with negative feedback about performance issues, you might have trouble acquiring new users.
In fact, 54% of users who left a 1-star review in the Play Store mentioned app stability and bugs.1
It’s no wonder that stability and performance are top areas of focus for developers. Our own Firebase research shows that a top need for developers is to obtain the tools and services that help them debug technical issues, trace issues back to changes in their code, and detect technical performance issues.
A large portion of the pre-launch development for a new app is spent squashing bugs and testing for potential issues. But getting your app ready for launch is just the first step — once it’s out in the world, maintaining your app’s health becomes an ongoing process as you create new features and iterate on previous versions.
It's important to remember that app quality isn’t one-size-fits-all. Depending on the type of app and how you define success, you’ll want to prioritize the factors that are crucial for your business. With Firebase’s customized reporting tools and real-time insights, you can hone in on the metrics that matter most.
For instance, in a productivity app — where users want a clean, simple interface and the ability to use it on the go — slow response time and high error rates will cause many users to drop off. Conversely, users might tolerate a bit of lag between menu screens in a food delivery app. But if it crashes every time they reach the checkout screen, your in-app revenue is sure to suffer.
No matter what type of app you have, here are a few of the most notable quality metrics that successful apps get right:
Monitoring metrics like these can mean the difference between driving downloads and retaining satisfied users versus seeing churn and negative reviews from dissatisfied users.
To stay ahead in such a dynamic app ecosystem, you need to know precisely where stability and performance issues occur in your app. In the next two blog posts of this series, we’ll spotlight two Firebase products that can help you detect crashes in your app and gather actionable insight about your app’s performance from a user’s perspective.
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