Why We Built Specto
A new-generation mobile app performance management platform
Engineers have been building mobile apps ever since the first native iOS SDK was released way back in 2008. Back then, most of the users were in North America or Europe, there were fewer devices and OS versions to support, and the native SDKs themselves offered only a small subset of the functionality they do now. The tooling was simple but it did the job. As mobile grew as a platform, so did the number of their users and their demands. They wanted high-quality and stable apps. Apple and Google evolved their tools and the community decided to build some on their own: to capture crash reports, analytics, and help with push notifications. The competition between apps was heating up, so an app had to offer a better user experience than its competitors.
Today the demands from app users are higher than ever. In 2021 it’s expected that mobile app downloads will reach 258 billion. Users spend on average 3h 40m per day on mobile, over 90% of that time is spent in a mobile app while just 10% is spent in a web browser (source: App Annie State of Mobile 2020). Developers seek advanced and effective tools to make their apps perform well. To have a nicely designed app that doesn’t crash is not enough anymore. The app has to launch quickly and be snappy and responsive as Jonas Badalic details in his post. 80% of people will use a problematic app 3 times or less and 53% will uninstall it completely if it’s unresponsive (source: Akamai). A lot of money is being left on the table.
A new generation of mobile development tools and platforms is necessary.
Introducing Specto
Specto collects data at an unprecedented level of granularity, allowing us to provide insights that are not possible using traditional tools, all while running in production — on real end-user devices. No more time-consuming manual profiling or user scenario modelling, no more frustrating bug reproduction work. Trying to acquire that unknown Android device that someone seems to be using in India just so you can manually profile? You don’t have to. When you realize there is a bug you will already have the data from that specific device in Specto. Nathanael wrote on the differences between profiling locally and using Specto.
We have been working on Specto for almost two years. It requires rethinking performance monitoring from a mobile-centric perspective to build something ready to be used by some of the largest apps in the world. And it requires a team of experts — we are a small team of mobile and data infrastructure engineers from companies like Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Algolia, Elastic, and Paravision.
We’ve been working with companies like Notion, Rapha, and Quora during our development phase and Specto is already being used in production.
“We use Specto to find and act on opportunities to improve the performance of our mobile apps before they ship. In just a few weeks, this helped us reduce startup time of our Android apps by 15%.” – Notion Apps Team Manager Arty Vohmincevs
Today, we’re so excited to launch Specto publicly! To learn more about how Specto can help optimize your app’s performance, please visit our website. You can try the platform for free here.
To be able to develop such a complex platform, we have raised $3.25m in seed capital from some great investors, including Susa Ventures, Fuel Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, SV Angel, Mike Vernal, and Mary Pimenova. We feel grateful to be surrounded by such kind and helpful people!
We’re very excited to show the world what we have built and to help raise the bar in app quality across the mobile ecosystem! You can find us on Twitter and if you create an account you get access to our private Slack community where the Specto team will be more than happy to help with all your app performance questions.
🚀
