Given the proliferation of mobile apps on smartphones across the world, it’s about time that someone came out with a global benchmark to set standards and gauge performance. PacketZoom, a mobile app accelerator, has stepped in to fill that vacuum, launching its Global Mobile App Network Benchmarks, the first of its kind.
PacketZoom characterizes the benchmark as “the first global standard” for mobile app developers to evaluate and measure their app performance across a variety of geographic regions and networks. Prior to this, mobile app publishers had no well established standard against which they could compare their performance, a gaping blindspot considering the growing importance of mobile apps to businesses.
The benchmark was developed by aggregating the performance of apps, and crunching millions of data points to yield a single metric per country. It analyzes data of app performance across a range of networks, including 2G, 3G, 4G,and Wi-Fi.
The inaugural results for October 2016 have been released for 20 countries that have been selected for their size and the amount of mobile traffic they generate. The numbers yield interesting insights about mobile app performance and user experience by country.
For instance, the top five countries in terms of mobile app response times are:
- France: 276 ms
- Spain: 338 ms
- Netherlands: 355 ms
- UK: 357ms
- Germany: 389 ms
The top five countries, with the lowest disconnection rates, are:
- Japan: 2.8%
- South Korea: 3.4%
- Taiwan: 3.5%
- USA: 3.9%
- Netherlands: 5.5%
The five worst countries in terms of amount of packet loss experienced on mobile apps are:
- China: 30.2%
- South Korea: 6.1%
- UK: 5.1%
- Japan: 4.6%
- Taiwan: 4.0%
The benchmark and report also has results that rank countries in terms of transfer time and transfer failure.
“One of the greatest challenges for mobile app development has been a lack of standard metrics to measure the end user experience,” says Shlomi Gian, CEO of PacketZoom. “We created global benchmarks so that developers have a performance standard to relate to when deploying applications globally.”