Version trends: Compare user adoption metrics and performance

Mobile monitoring provides a Version trends report with metrics to compare usage, adoption, and performance across the most recent versions of your mobile app. This helps mobile app development managers and their teams to compare up to five production versions from a single page and to analyze the impact of improvements, fixes, and degradations for each.

You can view version trend data in the Mobile monitoring user interface. You can also set up your New Relic account email preferences to receive version trend data by email.

Requirements

Occasionally you may see this message in the Version trends user interface: "No adoption data is available for this version because it is running an older agent." This indicates the mobile app version was not using the New Relic agent version that collects event data for counts on installs and upgrades.

To collect version trend information for your mobile app, make sure your agent version is:

This New Relic for Android or iOS version is required if you want to use version trend information with New Relic Insights.

To view the Version trends report:

  1. Go to one.newrelic.com > Mobile > (select an app) > App > Version trends.

  2. Select the Launch time period to compare versions by day (default), week, or month, or view all available data.

    Version Trends iOS 2016-01-07 Launch buttons.png

  3. Review the version trend details to analyze performance, user adoption, and key technical indicators. For additional suggestions about how to interpret the data, review the examples.
  4. Optional: To opt in or out of version trends email reports, select the Enable version trends email notifications link.

View version trend details

Each version includes several metrics to analyze performance, user adoption, and key technical indicators.

Performance across releases

An important feature is comparison of app performance across releases, based on data collected when each version was at its peak of popularity. You can select four different views of data for when each version was in production, including:

  • Launch day (default)
  • Launch week
  • Launch month
  • All available data for the version

This quickly helps you see whether the adoption and performance characteristics of an app's version are better or worse than others.

Summary mobile app information for each release includes:

  • Versions: Versions of your app release, sorted by date of highest popularity
  • Sessions: Count of mobile app sessions showing usage of each release
Critical user adoption metrics

You can compare different versions to see how successfully they have been adopted by users.

  • Total users: Count of unique users (devices) active
  • Upgrades: Count of unique users (devices) active that were upgrades from a previous app version
  • New installs: Count of unique users (devices) active who performed a new install of this app

Upgrades and new installs combine to reveal adoption in the form of total unique installs.

Key technical indicators

Key technical performance indicators include stability, network health, other app or server problems, and memory usage:

  • To track stability, the UI shows the Crash rate as the percentage of all app sessions that crashed.
  • To understand whether networking problems are originating from the app, network, or server, the UI shows the percentage of server responses that returned an HTTP error code (HTTP errors) and the percentage of network calls that failed to receive a response (Network failure).
  • To identify other problems from the app or server, the UI shows the average number of network requests made per app session (Requests per session) and the average server Response time as seen from the app’s perspective.
  • To compare improvements or problems with Memory usage, the first four versions include metrics indicating better (green) or worse (red) performance than the previous version's.

Interpret version trend data (examples)

Here are some examples of how to interpret some of the data that appears. For additional examples and information about using Mobile monitoring's Version trends report, read this blog post.

Example Comments
Improvements A new release with faster response time than previous releases may indicate that development efforts were successful.
Problems A new release with a spike in crashes, as compared to the previous releases, may indicate that a change introduced in the library or framework is not handling the new scenario or code path properly.
User adoption A new release with low numbers of upgrades or new installs may indicate slow adoption of the newest version. This in turn may help justify a new or changed focus in marketing the new release.
Release maintenance An older release with continued higher numbers of total users also may indicate slow adoption of the newest version. This in turn may result in unanticipated costs for continued support, or delays in deprecating the old version and its back-end APIs.

Analyze version trend data with Insights

We include two NRQL attributes to analyze version trend information:

  • To track when a session includes a new install or a new upgrade, use install. This attribute records true for new installations.
  • To track the last version of the mobile app when an upgrade is detected, use upgradeFrom.

To use these attributes in Insights, make sure your version of Mobile's Android agent or iOS agent supports them.

For more help

Additional documentation resources include:

If you need more help, check out these support and learning resources: