How Aksela Improves Mobile App Performance By Up To 86%
Mobile app developers are pressed to deliver faster and more responsive apps to meet modern requirements. They use different APIs to integrate and interact with other cloud services, such as payment, e-commerce, and mapping. An API allows the app to exchange data with other software, but it consumes network bandwidth and incurs latency.
Substantial user growth increases the API traffic volume. This stretches the transaction capacity and increases data exchange duration, which impacts app performance.
In this article, we’ll explore the key challenges in developing a responsive app and how Aksela serves as an ideal solution.
Why Does App Responsiveness Matter?
Delivering a functional app is no longer sufficient to ensure user loyalty, increase in-app spending and reduce churn rate. Instead, organizations must strive harder to deliver a responsive app that doesn’t exhibit the slightest sign of sluggishness.
Here’s why.
User Experience
Mobile users have very little tolerance for apps that behave erratically. According to Dimensional Research, 53% of users will uninstall an app if it crashes, and 41% expect the app to respond in 2 seconds or less.
Brand Reputation
Surging API traffic at peak hours can deny users of critical services when they need them most. Such incidents cast the company in a bad light and cause long-lasting damage to the brand’s value.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
On the top of the search engine results page, Google suggests apps that are related to users’ search queries. Latency from slow API calls will negatively impact the mobile app’s position on Google.
App Store Optimization (ASO)
Users turn to Google Play Store and Apple App Store to download mobile apps. These marketplaces are mini search engines that rely on certain ranking signals. If an app frequently crashes or has trouble loading, it generates bad reviews. This directly affects its ranking in the marketplace.
Key Challenges of Delivering a Sleek, Responsive App
Developers grapple with these challenges and bottlenecks when developing high-performing apps.
Latency
Every single microsecond makes a difference when making API calls, rendering screens, processing logic, and other app functions. Limitations in mobile device processing power, development frameworks, API servers, and cellular network impacts app performance and increases latency.
Reliability
A reliable app is efficient and has high availability. The challenge in app development is to ensure the app performs consistently in different locations. For example, an app might work seamlessly in London but takes several seconds to load in the Asia region.
Security
API usage in mobile apps requires a robust security framework. Data traversing between mobile devices and servers through public networks are vulnerable to malicious attacks, such as code injection. Such incidents will compromise API data and user privacy.
Scalability
Developers must be able to scale computing resources to meet surging demands during peak hours. Solely relying on the origin server limits the app’s ability to scale when the API traffic builds up.
What is Aksela, and How Does it Empower Mobile App Experiences?
Aksela is an API acceleration solution that allows mobile apps to maintain optimum performance and responsiveness even amidst heavy traffic. It allows developers to maintain scalable, secure, and reliable apps and websites. Market leaders in E-commerce, OTT, Gaming and many more industries use Aksela to deliver an impeccable user experience.
Aksela – Speed, Availability, Security and More
Aksela is engineered to overcome app performance issues that plague developers. It offers a series of cutting-edge features that promises remarkable results.
86% Faster API Calls
Aksela uses TCP acceleration, micro-caching, content compression and HTTP/2 techniques complemented with a rich set of features to boost mobile app performance.
In terms of micro-caching, Aksela provides different options such as no-cache, custom cache and full cache. When micro-caching is enabled, many API requests no longer need to make a round trip through the origin server. Instead, it uses smart caching systems at 50+ PoPs worldwide to speed up REST and GraphQL API calls. This removes the burden from the origin server and allows applications to manage millions of daily API requests without crashing the backend server.
100% Uptime
Apps leveraging Aksela’s distributed caching ability will never suffer downtime despite the failure of the origin server or unusual / unpredictable traffic spikes. Even if one of the PoPs breaks down, the API request will be rerouted to the next available micro-caching server – ensuring continuous availability.
Cyber Resilience
Aksela protects app data and servers by employing several cybersecurity measures. It uses Anycast DNS, a special data routing method that mitigates DDoS and bad bot attacks. Aksela also provides developers with a geo-blocking protection feature, which fences off attacks targeting app users in a specific region.
To defend against common cyber threats, Aksela integrates with Medianova Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) Platform. This allows to analyze data packets that pass through servers and block malicious connections. Also, Aksela encrypts web traffic with the TLS1.3 protocol to prevent cyber criminals from manipulating and misusing sensitive data.
Test Results
Aksela is proven and tested in real-world applications. E-commerce platforms being in the first place, Aksela helps many industries address the growing concerns about overloaded origin servers and insufficient mobile app performance. Mobile apps suffer from frequent outages when the origin server struggles to cope with voluminous API requests.
According to the test we performed by the 3rd party real user monitoring platform, Catchpoint, one of our client’s mobile app reported a huge improvement in Average Connect Time from 49,08 ms to 6,55 ms, making it 86% faster. Meanwhile, Average Response Time reduced from 870,41 ms to 197,12 ms, leading to an improvement by more than 77%.
Accelerate and Secure your Mobile App with Aksela. Enhance your API performance, security and availability while maximizing your user experiences. You can start your instant free trial now!
