This blog post was authored by Rahul Bagaria, a program manager on the Windows Phone developer tools team.
- Jonathan
Consumers and businesses are increasingly becoming dependent on the continuous connection of smartphones to networks. However, there is a side effect that stems from such pervasive network connectivity, which is often termed as bill shock for smartphone users. Users are frequently billed unexpectedly high connection fees due to their bandwidth use, which most of the time is a result of using apps that download data that is not necessary and are frequently bandwidth inefficient. It leads to a bad user experience, which is going to increase as more enterprises integrate apps in workplace operations. Additionally, the emergence of 4G will compel users to stay permanently connected.
High bandwidth usage is not the only network problem experienced by users; let's look at some of the other problems stemming from poorly designed apps:
- Continuously pinging the network and performing redundant downloads, as well as other inefficient network use impacts high energy consumption and leads to quick battery drain, sometimes twice as fast as that of similar apps with proper design.
- Apps are slow to load pages or are unresponsive to user actions due to heavy download in low speed or poor quality networks
As a developer, it makes sense to design network-efficient and energy-efficient apps, which ultimately leads to good user experience and better ratings and reviews. It means a user should be able to run these apps without any worry of it draining the battery unexpectedly, or leading to bill shock or unresponsiveness. Here I present a new tool called Network Monitoring which will allow you to visualize how network efficient your apps are and optimize them to efficiently consume fewer resources.
Network monitoring
Before we go into further detail, let's review our typical photo app which, we had seen when exploring Simulation Dashboard (check out the PhotoSlydr app which was optimized using the following steps):
- On the Debug menu, select Start Windows Phone Application Analysis or press Alt+F1.
- In the Application Analysis screen, choose Monitoring and press Start Session.
- The app will be started on the chosen target, and the Application Monitoring tool will gather data in background.
- Exit the app by pressing the Back key; the monitoring session will end and a Summary Report will be generated.
I just ran the app, selected an album, and explored it on the next page. I tried using both 3G and Wi-Fi using the Simulation Dashboard to understand the difference in user experience and network information. Here are the results:
The information we can glean from the summary is that our app downloaded 6.44MB of data just for browsing a photo album, which will be extremely heavy on the pocket of a budget-conscious user and will take loads of time to download on low-speed networks. Clicking the Alerts section, we come to the Graphs page: