While using an app, users expect it to be highly responsive and fast loading. At times apps may take an abnormal amount of time to open a new screen. In Android, this issue is known as screen load delay.
Normally screen load delay occurs in Android apps when the main thread consumes a lot of time to execute complex processes while loading a new activity or a fragment.
Screen load delays affect the user experience, but they go unnoticed by developers and cause users to even rate the app poorly on the android play store. Therefore, it is important for developers to be notified about screen load delay at the earliest.
This is where Finotes comes in.
With a simple 3 step integration process, Finotes SDK for Android apps is capable of automatically detecting screen load delay. For more detailed integration guide, visit our documentation pages for Android (Java & Kotlin)
Detecting screen load delay with the help of activity trail
When an activity or a fragment in an Android app takes more than 6 seconds to load, Finotes immediately reports it as an issue. Bug reports from Finotes include relevant data points like activity trail, device and device state data, that will help developers to reproduce the bugs faster.
Activity Trail
Activity trail is a chronologically ordered list of app events, that will aid the developers to understand the user flow for a minute prior to the occurrence of the issue.
Activity trail has three components
The Activity segment, that has details of the app event.
The timestamp segment, that has details of the time at which the event got recorded.
The memory segment, that shows the percentage of free memory.
The above screenshot shows that Finotes SDK has detected a delay in the loading of ‘ChatActivity’.
To identify the root cause of the issue, let us take a close look at the activity trail. Here 'ChatActivity:onStart' started after the event 'ChatActivity: loading user from db' with a gap of more than six seconds. The delay is caused during the event 'loading user data from the database' and this information gives a clear direction on what the fix should be.
Fixing screen loading delay
It is better to execute all time-consuming processes like database operations, I/O operations and calculations through separate threads. This approach will help in avoiding such delays.
Finotes also detects screen load delay in iOS and watchOS apps. Apart from screen load delays, Finotes is capable of detecting API call issues, ANR issues, memory leaks, abnormal memory usage, function failures, crashes and custom issues.
Visit finotes.com to learn more about Finotes. Detailed documentation is available at docs.finotes.com.