Tips to Consider to Avoid Mobile Apps Crash

The year 2017 has almost come to an end and the mobile app landscape has received a phenomenal response with various new trends redefining the digital world. Today, latest technologies have come up and is taking businesses to newer heights. So, if you have plans to develop a mobile app for your business, then make sure that you are well aware of the mobile app development trends that will surely redefine your business.

In the past few years the market has been flooded with smartphones and people have become used to certain apps that they need in their day to day lives. But it is not uncommon to experience mobile application crashes and research has stated that 53% of the users uninstall any app if it freezes, behaves abnormally or even crashes. So, it is crucial for the developers to highly consider the stability issues and avoid disappointing the users.

Here in this article, let’s discuss some reasons why a mobile app may crash and here is how you can improve to fix the common issues related to performance and instability:

Memory management:

Bad memory management is one of the biggest reasons behind crashing of mobile apps on especially low end devices and tablets. Though today’s phones and tablets all come with great CPU speed, but still developers should manage the memory and processing power to make the app crash free. Two important points that should be considered are the programming practices and the device fragmentation. Mobile app developers should never tax the system when their app boots and iPhone developers should manually manage the memory and inform the OS which objects are in use and which are not.

The development process and lifecycle:

The traditional development process involves three steps: development, testing and release and this has some pros and cons. Though the iterative process is much like the agile development, but it makes things more complex. The agile development process includes building up of the application where the developers release an early version of the app into the market to create the audience base and improve the features, performance, design and stability of the app and other issues over time. Integration of any third party software or services takes it to a whole new level.

Poor connection:

Though programmers often keep their codes tight and effective, but handling of a poor network connectivity may force the app to crash as well. Unreliable connection can often cause the phone to retrieve bad data or at times get no data at all. Programmers may make mistakes on how to handle if something goes wrong when the data is on the route. Any mobile app should always have a plan for a drop in connectivity.

Insufficient testing:

With hundreds and thousands of mobile phone device manufacturers and every year more and more models flooding the market, it is now becoming very tough for the developers to test their apps on real devices, particularly if they have low budgets. And releasing an app without proper testing often leads to performance issues and sudden crash of the application. Mobile app testing tools help to test the apps in real devices, allowing them to easily find the bugs and fix the problems as soon as possible.

Exception handling:

Complications in a mobile app may be due to various reasons that include memory issues, network conditions, unexpected API changes and etc. Good error or exception handling are something that stands between such situations and this way the app doesn’t crash due to an incorrect response from the user or a temporary loss of connectivity. Properly coded app considers the unexpected situation and have a graceful means of terminating the process while informing the user of the specific error.

Sloppy code:

Most of the mobile apps crash simply because of the errors in programming. When a programmer develops an app, they should be very careful and try to guess where things can go wrong. While implementing any custom features on the app, chances are high that some bugs are left unnoticed. So, a new feature or functionality should always be thoroughly tested and checked by the mobile developers.

Summary

If you are interested in bringing your business on mobile platforms through an app, then it is very important to make sure that during development great care is taken to detect the errors, understand them and address them to save the app from crashing later on.