Data-driven development with Cloudflare Mobile SDK
If your app loads critical resources over the network, it’s relying on your user’s mobile network connection to deliver an engaging experience. Network errors occur in 3 to 12% of app sessions depending on infrastructure reliability and user geography.
How much engagement are you losing in your app to network errors? Chances are, you don’t know.
We didn’t either, until we built a free tool that helps Android and iOS developers visualize and understand their mobile app’s network utilization.
Introducing Cloudflare Mobile SDK
Our SDK helps you identify slowdowns caused by balky or too frequent network calls, so you can focus your development effort on optimizing the lowest-hanging fruit.
Modern app developers already heavily instrument their apps to identify UX impacting events: they measure and collect launch time, session length, crash rates, conversion events, and lots more, using a multitude of different metrics packages and services.
Web developers look at similar data. They also pay tons of attention to their resource waterfall, mapping their critical rendering path, and understanding which resource loads are synchronous, which are not, and which block rendering. JavaScript even exposes an API to collect waterfalls in the browser programmatically.
It’s time to bring the same visibility to your app’s network waterfall.
Using Cloudflare Mobile SDK, you can identify top N requests, slow requests, and requests most likely to fail. You can also inspect all the third party calls your app is making through included libraries. Always suspected that ad network you’re calling out to is killing your app’s performance? Now you know.
Our aim is to make this data as useful as possible. We know you’re already looking at engagement data in tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap. To this end, we’re making it as easy as possible to correlate network experience data with the event and engagement data you’re already tracking.
All of this is free as in beer, with no cap on active users or metrics tracked. Collecting metrics does not require you use Cloudflare as part of your infrastructure stack, and adds minimal weight to your app APK or IPA. Integration is as simple as including our library, adding one line to your AppDelegate or Gradle config, and building.
Privacy is, and was, top of mind as we built this. Cloudflare Mobile SDK does not collect any persistent identifiers (UDID, IDFA, etc.), and we will never sell the data we collect to any third party.
Interested in giving this a shot?
Register for an SDK key here: mobilesdk.cloudflare.com/v2s/signup
And get docs here: developers.cloudflare.com/mobile-sdk/overview/
Originally published at blog.cloudflare.com on March 22, 2018.
