Mobile developers are frequently told that excessive battery drain is one of the key reasons why users abandon apps. But much less is said about how a developer can avoid this problem and ensure that their app is energy efficient.
GameBench is one of the easiest ways to gather power metrics that are both reliable and immediately useful for optimisation. In this article we’ll go through the basic steps of how to get these data , using YouTube and Netflix as examples.
News reading apps are the quiet ninjas of the mobile world. On the face of it, they perform a simple, repetitive task: displaying the daily news. Whether it's the Huffington Post, the BBC, The Guardian or the Mail Online, they all go about this task in very similar ways.
Behind the scenes, however, the popularity of the leading news outlets is so great, and there’s so much pressure to engage and retain habitual readers (who are fussy and spoilt for choice), that news reading apps have become the focus of huge amounts of technical skill and resources, both in terms of software development and QA. The apps may be simple, but perfecting them isn’t.
If you'll be at GDC this year, please feel free to come and meet us. We can help you to use our latest free tools to test any game or device that you're interested in, so you can discover how its frame rate, resource usage and other performance metrics compare to rival products on the market.
The notion of frame rate, or frames per second (fps), which measures the smoothness of an animation, is traditionally associated with game development rather than app development. This is because games depend on stutter-free graphics in order to feel immersive, believable and responsive to a gamer’s touch inputs.
However, as businesses increasingly rely on visual fluidity to sell their products and transmit the quality of their brands, this distinction between the two sides of our industry is becoming obsolete.
Streaming video, displaying moving ads, scrolling through media-rich pages, swiping across screens, zooming and dragging -- at a fundamental level these are all animations that feel wrong if they’re not smooth. And frame rate is pretty much the the only objective way to measure this smoothness as a user perceives it on their screen.
We're excited to announce that GameBench has just entered into a key partnership with TestPlant, a leader in the automated app testing space.
We're working to allow our respective products, GameBench-A and eggPlant, to work seamlessly with each other, so that TestPlant customers -- including brands like HP, Nike, MTV many others -- can gain extra performance insights from their automated app testing.
These customers will be able to script a set of user actions and deploy that script hundreds or thousands of times across different software builds or different hardware models in order to rapidly identify UX slow-downs, graphics bottlenecks and other optimisation issues. All the performance data from these automated tests will be fed back to their GameBench dashboard for visualisation, comparison and sharing with other team members.