Site Reliability Engineering – In almost all cases, users of a particular service are known to interact often with the mobile app. Hence, it is important for the app to be reliable so as to portray a good reputation for the service.
To achieve this, the numerous challenges including memory constraints, limited battery capacity, varying network conditions etc must be overcome. This is why most services employ site reliability engineering (SRE) in the development of their native mobile apps.
SRE is a goal-oriented approach known to be based on certain principles, methodologies and organizational dynamics with the goal of ensuring mobile app reliability. This approach is also known to be adopted by large organizations including NetFlix.
Why SRE in Mobile Apps?
Development of mobile applications is one thing. Ensuring the reliability of such app is another thing. Because of the complexity of mobile applications these days, there are different worse scenarios that can happen at the user’s end. These situations can be summed up into three categories – performance, security and availability.
These situations are what SRE helps prevent via the use of numerous principles and practices. SRE will help prevent situations like “application not responding” or “blank screen” or “crashing” in your mobile app.
Application of SRE In Mobile App Development
The goal of SRE in mobile app development is to make both the service and the users happier. In order to achieve this, there are some known principles of SRE that are applied to mobile apps in order to overcome the major challenges they pose.
- Mobile App Availability
If you can’t see it, then you can’t measure it, not to talk of improving it. This implies that availability of mobile application is very important. Mobile applications might become unavailable for numerous reasons including
Crash: A crash can occur for numerous reasons and will make the mobile application to be unstable and/or unavailable. To tackle this, tools like Firebase Crashlytics can be used in tracking, prioritizing and fixing the instability.
Analytics: Mobile apps run on different devices and these devices are known to depend on CPU, memory etc. Hence, they tend to affect the analytic of mobile applications. SRE tools like Firebase Performance can be employed in order to gain insight into the analytics of how mobile apps perform on different operating systems including Android, iOS etc
App version management: From time to time, there is always the need for the release of a newer version of a mobile app. Unlike server applications however, mobile applications can not be reverted once they are rolled out. Hence, it is always hard to get a bug fixed during release. However, some businesses strive on the constant update of their mobile apps due to the incorporation of newer features. Site reliability engineering can also help in overcoming this. For instance, there could be the use of in-app app updates which helps in the expedition of newer version.
Debuggability
It is very easy to debug while in development but it always pose a very challenging situation when it comes to debugging while in production. This will help increase the unavailability of mobile apps. Hence, it is important to have a very good turnaround time duriing production so as to make the app more available to users even while debugging.
Unfortunately, debugging logs, which are SRE tools, are known to be hard to find. However, one can build an in-house debugging framework in order to tackle the problem.
- Performance and Efficiency
Mobile applications are known to share essential resources like battery in the mobile devices. Excess consumption of battery by these apps can attract negative reviews and reduce the reliability. To overcome this, SRE can be employed. One of the tools you can use is Android Vitals. The tool helps in assembling data about app stability, permission denials, battery usages etc. These data are displayed on the Android Vital dashboard by the Google Console.
Conclusion
Even though the creation of mobile applications is not an easy task, making them reliable is even more challenging. Users find it hard to reliable on mobile applications that come up with different problems every now and there. This is why Site Reliability Engineering is very important. It should be noted however that SRE is a journey. Therefore, in order to use it effectively, the right approach must be followed. That’s why Lead Web Praxis Media Limited is here to help you achieve your reliability goals. Contact us today for more information on how we can help you.