How can you measure loading time and identify bottlenecks in AR mobile apps?

1 Why loading time matters

Loading time is the time it takes for your app to launch and display the first screen or scene to the user. It includes the time spent on initializing the app, loading assets, initializing the AR session, and rendering the first frame. Loading time affects the user's perception of your app's quality, responsiveness, and reliability. A long loading time can frustrate the user, lower their expectations, and increase the chances of app abandonment. According to Google, 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load.

3 How to optimize loading time

Optimizing loading time requires identifying and reducing or eliminating the bottlenecks that slow down your app. Common bottlenecks and optimization strategies include asset loading, AR session initialization, and rendering performance. For asset loading, you can use compression, streaming, caching, and lazy loading to reduce size and number of assets, as well as load them when needed. To optimize AR session initialization, pre-warming, asynchronous initialization, and user feedback can reduce the initialization time and improve user experience. Lastly, to optimize rendering performance, batching, culling, LOD, and shaders can reduce draw calls, polygons, and pixels that your app needs to render. These techniques can help you achieve a smooth and stable frame rate.

4 How to test loading time

To test loading time, you need to simulate a variety of scenarios and conditions that your app may encounter in the real world. This includes testing your app on different devices and platforms, as well as different network conditions like Wi-Fi, 4G, 3G, or offline. Additionally, you should also test user behaviors such as launching the app, granting permissions, starting the AR experience, switching between scenes, or quitting the app. All of this is to make sure that your app meets the minimum performance requirements and standards for each device and platform, can handle network latency, bandwidth, and availability issues, and can handle user inputs and actions smoothly and gracefully.

5 How to monitor loading time

To monitor loading time, you need to collect and analyze data from your app's users, and identify any issues or trends that may affect your app's performance and user satisfaction. You have several options for tracking and measuring the loading time and other performance metrics of your app: Firebase Performance Monitoring or Google Analytics for native apps, Lighthouse or WebPageTest for web-based apps, and Unity Analytics or Unreal Insights for apps built with game engines. Each of these tools can provide insights and recommendations to help you improve your app's performance.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?