Mission to Mars: Planet of the Apps
225 million km’s away, roaming the Martian surface, live the users of possibly the most expensive App ever developed. With a meager 2 MAU’s (monthly active user base), the MER-B, and the Curiosity, both running WindRiver’s VxWorks operating system, use navigation and control software Apps developed by Nasa.
Occasional software patches and updates are necessary, requiring NASA’s engineering teams to beam code from Earth to Mars. That journey, sending data packets at the speed of light, takes about 13–20 minutes.
This is quite the impressive feat! But 2 MAUs is hardly impressive, and 13 minutes would be too slow for the expectations of us Earthlings in our app centric worlds, right?
Curious about these questions, at Branch we analyzed the install times for over 12M different links and observed that it takes over 30 minutes for more than 90% of those people to actually complete the install flow. That time was measured from click, to app store, to install, to first open: 30 minutes. This time doesn’t even include the average 7 days it takes to get an app approved by the app store.
The year is 2015, and it’s now faster to send an App to Mars than it is to get a user to install your App
In 2010, Google announced a progressive update to their ranking algorithms stating that slow websites would be penalized and ranked lower. Slow, defined as sites taking more than just a few seconds. Their reasoning, if you want to see a piece of content, you want to see it now.
Where have we gone? What have we done?
If you’re interested in exploring this problem, and building technology to bring us back to Earth, hit me up: we’re hiring over at Branch Metrics!
