The State of Mobile Experience 2023 – Embrace Report

Embrace has released The State of Mobile Experience 2023, a report that explores the top challenges for mobile app users and developers. Here are some interesting figures from it.

• In a world of instant gratification and ever-improving technology, users are conditioned to expect ever faster responses from their devices. So how fast should the speed be? For users, this often depends on the task or operation they are performing. In 2018, a study found that 71% of app users expect a mobile app to load in 3 seconds or less, and over 60% of users would abandon an app that didn’t load in 5 seconds. Today, that 3-second figure has dropped even further, and best practices suggest startup times should be 2 seconds or less for an optimal user experience.
  
• The study showed that reliability is one of the most important characteristics of a mobile application for users (66%), second only to security (70%). And speed, as we have already seen, is one of the critical performance factors that can change or ruin the user experience. But this is not the only indicator that affects users:
  
• Nearly 40% of users find crashes to be “extremely frustrating”, while a third of users say the same thing when an app freezes. We are seeing a decrease in the intensity of negative emotions when users respond about slow application launch, as well as slow video/audio loading.
  
• The traditional subject of research is why users are willing to uninstall a . The main thing is crashes. In second place are the friezes. On the third – the inability to fill out the form.
  
• For developers, the main problem is monitoring the performance of applications. In second place is work with constant changes, in third is development for many devices and operating systems.
  
• If we look specifically at performance, then expectedly, crashes, startup times, and problems with memory consumption attract the most attention.
  
• It is interesting how the problems differ between iOS and Android platforms:
  
• Benchmarks by platform and category:
  
  
• What can drastically change mobile development – AI, Low/no-code and AR/VR:
  

User data – results of a survey of 901 people in the United States in December 2022. Developer data – answers from 78 mobile engineers, product managers, etc. US professionals in March 2023. App data — 133 iOS and 126 Android apps featured on the Embrace platform. You can read the entire report on the website.