Are you a meteorologist?
If you’re reading this, probably not. Or, maybe you are. I don’t know. But if you think about it, just like a meteorologist tries to predict the weather, you probably find yourself trying to predict the future of your mobile apps.
As developers and performance engineers, we often have to make educated guesses about how our mobile apps will behave under various conditions. We do this by analyzing past behavior, and based on that, we predict future performance. It’s not quite meteorology, but you have to make sure your app is fast, reliable, and responsive regardless of the forecast.
When it comes to mobile apps, one of the most critical areas to understand is how transactions work. But not all transactions are created equal. There’s a big difference between what we call a “regular transaction” and a “business transaction.” Understanding this difference is important to correctly evaluating and improving mobile app performance.
Transactions in Mobile Apps: Regular vs. Business Transactions
Mobile apps are built around interactions—taps, swipes, data inputs, and server requests. Every action a user takes can be considered a transaction. For example, tapping on the login button or adding an item to a shopping cart are both transactions. But not all transactions are the same when it comes to evaluating their impact on the app’s performance.
A regular transaction is simply an individual action or a request. It could be something as basic as tapping a button to load a screen or sending a request to the server. But focusing on just these simple transactions doesn’t give the full picture of what the user is experiencing.
In mobile apps, users interact with applications in a flow of interconnected actions. When users are trying to do something with your app—like booking a flight, finding a specific product, or ordering a prescription—their experience involves multiple steps. All these interconnected actions, which together make up a user’s intent, create what’s called a business transaction.
A business transaction makes up all the steps a user takes to complete a task, including the server requests and app responses involved in that process. Understanding the difference between a regular transaction and a business transaction is the key to accurately analyzing performance in mobile apps.
The Importance of Business Transactions in Mobile Apps
So let’s say you’re developing a new mobile app for managing prescriptions. Your target users are doctors, and you want to ensure the app performs well for doctors working in different hospitals and clinics. Each of these locations have potentially different network conditions. One way to predict app performance is to measure the bandwidth usage, latency, and response times during specific app uses.
You might decide to test the app by recording a few regular transactions—like how long it takes for the login button to respond or how fast a confirmation message appears after placing an order. Now while these measurements are important, they’re not enough to predict the overall experience of the doctors using your app.
To fully understand app performance from the user’s perspective, you need to look at the bigger picture—the entire business transaction. For a doctor ordering a prescription, the process might involve numerous steps:
- Navigating to the prescription screen.
- Searching for the appropriate medication.
- Searching for the patient’s information.
- Reviewing the details before placing the order.
- Submitting the prescription and waiting for confirmation.
Each of these steps could involve multiple requests to the server, and the user’s perception of performance depends on how fast and smooth they can complete the whole process. Measuring individual button clicks or isolated interactions won’t give you the insight needed to understand how efficiently the doctor can perform these tasks as a whole.
Capturing Business Transactions in Mobile App Performance Testing
When analyzing the performance of a mobile app, it’s important to capture the entire sequence of interactions—the business transaction—instead of just individual actions.
Take a popular mobile shopping app, for example. A regular transaction might be the action of adding an item to the cart. But, the business transaction is much more involved. It can include searching for the product, checking reviews, adding the item to the cart, applying a discount code, and finally completing the checkout process. Each step could involve multiple screen loads, server requests, and database responses.
To capture this entire sequence, it’s important to monitor the app in real-world situations, where you consider things like network variability, device performance, and user behavior patterns.
Let’s look at these in more detail.
- Network variability—Mobile networks can be unpredictable. Users might be on a strong Wifi connection one minute and switch to a congested 3G network the next. To predict how the app will behave, it’s important to test the complete business transaction under different network conditions.
- Device performance—Mobile devices come in various shapes and sizes, and with different capabilities. A flagship Google Pixel might complete business transactions smoothly, while an older Samsung Galaxy device might struggle. Understanding how the entire sequence performs on a variety of devices is key.
- User behavior patterns—Users might not always follow a linear path. They could navigate back and forth between screens, abandon an action halfway through, or switch between apps. Capturing these real user flows is critical to measuring business transaction performance correctly.
By capturing these bigger sequences of actions, you get a much clearer picture of how users experience the app, where the bottlenecks are, and which steps are causing problems.
Predicting Mobile App Performance with Business Transactions
The primary goal of analyzing business transactions is to make informed predictions about how your mobile app will perform under real-world conditions. When you have insights into the entire transaction flow, you can better anticipate potential issues and make the necessary app changes.
For example, if you determine that the “order a prescription” transaction for a doctor takes too long during peak hospital hours, you might decide to optimize server responses, preload certain data, or even change how requests are batched to minimize load times. It’s not just about making individual screens load faster—it’s about making sure that the whole workflow is efficient and responsive.
In another example, imagine if you have a social media app where users upload images and share them with their friends. A regular transaction might be the tap to pick a photo, while the business transaction includes picking the photo, adding a caption, tagging friends, and then posting it. If posting takes too long because of slow uploads or a lag in tagging friends, the entire process can feel slow, which results in frustrated users and potentially higher churn rates.
By focusing on business transactions, you ensure that the entire end-to-end experience is optimized, and creates a smoother journey for the user.
Optimizing Mobile Apps with Business Transaction Data
Once you’ve captured and analyzed business transactions, the next step is to make optimizations that have the biggest impact on user experience.
Here are some practical ways to use business transaction data to improve mobile app performance:
- Reduce roundtrips—Many business transactions involve multiple back-and-forth interactions between the app and the server. If a user has to wait for data to load multiple times in a single workflow, the experience can be frustrating. Identify ways to reduce roundtrips—like batching requests or preloading data—to make the entire transaction faster.
- Prioritize key transactions—Not all transactions are equally important. For a rideshare app, booking a ride is a lot more important than updating the profile picture. So by prioritizing the performance of key business transactions, you ensure that the core functionality of the app is always smooth and responsive.
- Optimize for poor network conditions—Since mobile users are usually on the go, they might run into different network conditions. Use business transaction data to identify where the app struggles under poor network conditions and implement solutions like caching, data compression, or offline capabilities to limit these issues.
- Device-specific improvements—Business transactions might perform well on high-end devices but poorly on older phones. Use your data to pinpoint where older devices are struggling and make optimizations that reduce resource consumption, like minimizing animations or reducing the number of background processes.
- User feedback and real user monitoring—Business transaction data combined with real user feedback can be very useful. For example, if users regularly leave the checkout process after applying a discount code, it might suggest performance issues or confusion in that step. But if you closely monitor these business transactions and act on feedback, you can continuously improve the user experience.
The Bottom Line: Think Like Your User
The biggest takeaway when discussing regular transactions versus business transactions in mobile apps is that we need to think beyond isolated actions. A regular transaction might tell you that a button click takes 200 milliseconds, but a business transaction tells you that completing a task—like ordering a prescription or booking a flight—takes 30 seconds. And it’s that 30 seconds that defines the user experience.
In mobile apps, where users expect immediate responses and smooth interactions, focusing on the entire business transaction is critical. It helps you understand the true user experience, identify potential bottlenecks, and optimize your app to verify that users can accomplish their app goals without unnecessary friction.
So, while you might not be a meteorologist, if you understand business transactions, you can predict—and shape—the future performance of your mobile app. And you can help make sure you have happier users and better outcomes.
To help with testing regular and business transactions, check out AppSpeed Audit.