Go to any app store and find a poorly rated app. Chances are, the reason it’s poorly rated has something to do with performance (or lack thereof). A recent survey by Mobile Entertainment found that a whopping 96% of American app users have been angered by a mobile app so bad that they have submitted a negative review. That seems a bit high, but we’ll take them at their word.

What else might cause a user to submit a bad review? Here are a few items mentioned:

Among the major issues forcing people to submit their bad reviews were freezing (76 per cent of survey participants), crashes (71 per cent), slow responsiveness (59 per cent), heavy battery usage (55 per cent) and too many ads (53 per cent).

Meanwhile, 98 per cent of respondents insisted that performance matters, with 63 per cent stating that this was most critical in banking and mapping apps.

When an app fails to meet expectations, 99 per cent said that they would take some form of action. 44 per cent said they would delete an app immediately, while 38 per cent said they would delete an app if it froze for longer than 30 seconds, with 18 per cent saying they would do the same if it froze for five seconds. However, 27 per cent claimed they would keep an app longer if they had paid for it.

Word of mouth also appears to be a key method for disgruntled app consumers to voice their concerns, with 32 per cent of users saying they would tell their friends about the underperforming application, while 21 per cent would complain about the app on Facebook or Twitter.

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Hurricane Sandy is hammering the east coast today as public transportation shuts down and people in flood zones evacuate to shelters. Thanks to technology, planning and preparing for severe weather is made easier with the many mobile apps available.

Here are some of the best apps for staying a step ahead of the storm:

iHurricane HD – Free: This app provides hurricane wind speeds, the eye of the hurricane location, and other forecasts. It also has real-time push notifications and alerts for warnings of any potential risk.

The Weather Channel – Free: Most of you may already have this app, but if you don’t – The Weather Channel app has full detailed forecast alerts, project path alerts, maps, and severe flood warning notifications.

Hurricane Tracker- $1.99: This app provides more than 65+ maps for tracking, push alerts, real-time audio and video updates and more.

Disaster Readiness- $1.49: The Disaster Readiness app provides a disaster supplies checklist and other hurricane emergency tips.

Many websites don’t hold up well against peak load traffic during a disaster like a hurricane. Therefore it is helpful to download a load tested native app for quick and easy tracking. What’s your favorite app for tracking and preparing for Hurricane Sandy? Feel free to share it in the comments section – and more importantly – stay safe!

Apple’s new OS update, iOS 6, was released yesterday. We posted this morning about the bugs that have been rolling in since release. Despite this, there is good news for Apple – recent reports show that there is already a likely high adoption for the iOS 6 update that will continue to soar.

According to Darrell Etherington of TechCrunch:

“The total size of the combined updates was well over 2GB spread across all products, representing a significant amount of data when counted across the mass of iPhone and Mac users around the world. Traffic levels were pushed to over 9 times their average levels, according to the Better Broadband Blog, which is good news for developers and Apple, since it means there’s already likely a high rate of early adoption for the iOS 6 update.”

This is a good sign that Apple has done its fair share of load testing. 9 times the average level is a pretty serious increase, and most often servers crash with that type of traffic growth.

iPhone users- what are your thoughts on the iOS 6 update? Let us know in the comments section.

Shunra, a company that specializes in network visualization and application performance engineering, recently conducted a survey of 246 IT specialists, managers, architects, developers and engineers from around the world to get their take on the importance of application performance. Here are some of the findings:

How focused on application performance is your company culture?

39% Half-way there
26% So close
18% Partially
14% Performance zen
3% Not at all

What are the top efforts used to develop a performance-minded culture?

• Facilitating open channels of communication between operations, support and development
• Measuring the financial impact of post-production failures
• Providing incentives to motivate employees to consistently meet or achieve service-level objectives
• Adding performance testing very early in the software development life cycle (SDLC)
• Proactively plan for continual performance monitoring, testing and validation

Read more…

We’ve said it before and I’m sure we’ll say it again. Mobile web users expect your site to work just as well on their phones as if they were sitting in front of a computer. And they’re not a very patient or forgiving lot either.

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People love reality TV. People also love an underdog story. So it it any wonder that viewing audiences flock to talent contest-esque shows that let them vote for their favorites? This phenomena is nothing new, but what was new a few years ago was the option to text your vote instead of sitting on an old fashioned phone line. What’s the next logical step after text-to-vote? Why, an app of course! Except apps require quite a bit more testing than the time-tested texting network. Unfortunately, a TV company in Britain didn’t take that into account. Here’s what happened (from Paid Content):

When UK commercial TV leader ITV announced it would take voting for its Britain’s Got Talent show via mobile app this May, it was supposed to herald the next step in the premium mobile TV participation phenomenon.

But insufficient testing meant the broadcaster could not process half of votes paid for by mobile users, and ITV had to abandon the app mid-series. In a complaint adjudication published by Ofcom on Monday, ITV said it had lost 51 percent of votes which came in via the mobile app.

A lack of load testing and insufficient network capacity was officially blamed for the blunder. ITV, the television network whose app failed mid-season, point-blank says the app’s creators did not perform enough testing before launch. It also announced that it will have more hands-on involvement with all future app testing (a good approach since it’s ultimately ITV that people will remember when they think of the disappointing app). Here’s their official statement:

Read more…

The big 2012 London Summer Olympics opening ceremony is approaching. The Summer Olympic Games have always been a struggle to keep up with; we don’t want to miss this worldwide series of events, yet many of us are in the middle of hectic summer activities and travel. With the growth of technology, and in particular mobile apps, we can now keep up with the Olympics wherever we are.

Sr. VP of Digital Media at NBC Sports and Olympics, Rick Cordella, marvels at how mobile apps have changed these worldwide events:

“I grew up watching the Olympics, like most kids in America. You want to cheer on your country, your athletes. In the past, if you weren’t in front of your TV you didn’t experience the Olympics. Now you can.”

Yesterday, NBC announced two free mobile apps that will let users follow their favorite events and keep up with the summer games. The apps are available across iOS and Android devices, and are built off Adobe technology. The first app, called the NBC Olympics Companion, is more of a second screen and provides more info while you are watching the events.

The second, called the NBC Olympics Live Extra app, delivers live streaming video to users on the move. As covered by Richard Lawler of Engadget, the app is pretty advanced: Read more…

There have been a plethora of studies looking at mobile shopping trends this holiday season (especially now that Cyber Monday is almost as well know as Black Friday). Most of the reports say vaguely the same thing – shopping on mobile devices has increased dramatically this year, especially when it comes to shopping on tablet devices. Were online retailers ready for this new trend? A study by Compuware doesn’t think so. From TechCrunch:

Despite the increases in tablet traffic, many retailers are not prepared to accommodate these new mobile shoppers. Compuware also prepared a chart showing the top retailers’ sites, and whether or not they offered an iPad-optimized website. Surprisingly, none of them do, not even Apple.com. What’s worse, Apple is also among the retailers who don’t offer a native iPad application. (The iPhone Apple Store app runs on the iPad, of course, but it’s not a universal app). For shame!

Apple is not alone though. Around half of the 30 top retailers Compuware looked didn’t have an iPad application, either.

That is one big, blank column! It’s pretty clear that retailers have adapted to the reality of mobile shopping when it comes to smartphones, but they’re a bit behind in optimizing for tablets. I wonder if any of these retailers have rushed to get a tablet optimized web (or native for those that didn’t have one) app out after the Black Friday – Cyber Monday rush. If they did, I hope they took the time to do some decent functional, usability and load testing before going live. Having a buggy, poor-performing app might just be worse than not having an app at all.

Call of Duty has been having some load issues lately. Last week a stat tracker/social network called Call of Duty Elite (which was tied to the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3) crashed when it couldn’t handle the giant influx of excited gamers.

At launch, our registration and login systems were crushed by gamers trying to enter the ELITE site at the same time. We have now fixed the registration and login systems, but we have found that the greater than expected demand is crashing servers. We’re immediately deploying multiple additional servers to beef up the system. We are also going to temporarily limit access to ELITE services on both the console applications and website while we build additional capacity and scale. We’ll look to increase access to greater numbers of users as soon as possible.

The issue is still being resolved.

But since this is MobileAppTesting.com, let’s get into the mobile app side of things. Call of Duty was supposed to launch a mobile version of Elite. That plan is now on hold. Following the initial site crash, Elite’s creators, Beachhead Studios, have decided to delay the mobile release and do more testing to prevent another problem. Here’s what the latest Call of Duty Elite status update said:

While many people are curious and excited to use Call of Duty ELITE’s mobile applications, we plan to release the iOS and Android apps when we’re confident the service will be able to handle the extra traffic they will generate – so stay tuned.

I don’t know if there were simply more concurrent users than Activision & Beachhead predicted or if they just didn’t do enough load testing. But at least they’re taking the chance now to up their testing instead of just moving forward with a faulty product. As they say, “better late than never” … but it sure would have looked a whole lot better if Beachhead had tested all this before a public launch.