Smartphones, the Disappointing Miracle

Crittercism looked at three billion interactions a day with apps for one month. It’s useful to start by thinking about the overall network, with all its phones and carriers. That would include, say, an Android device being used in India, a BlackBerry on Wall Street, or an iPhone in Germany. Once you take into consideration all of the different phone models (2,582), carriers (691), and versions of operating systems (106), there are over 100 million possible permutations of how a signal might be processed. Then there are the underlying mechanics of each smartphone app. It may appear to be a single piece of software, but most apps change with nearly every load, drawing on new information from cloud computing systems for new data.

Crittercism says that 46 percent of apps rely on six or more different cloud services, like Facebook’s login system, ad placement businesses, or Amazon Web Services, to function. Three percent draw off more than 20 different cloud services to deliver, say, that music app or that mobile game. Then there are the apps themselves. “About two million of those, between Android, iOS and the other stores and downloads,” Andrew Levy, Crittercism’s chief executive, said in an interview. So an unimaginable number of permutations of phones then draw on a huge number of different multimillion-dollar data centers, probably run by different companies. And how long does it take to put all this together, from the time you hit the touch screen until it starts to react in your phone? In the United States, it’s about 320 milliseconds from making a request to the initial response. The real issue for companies, however, is not load times as much as failure rates. When that happens, customers are alienated and no business happens. A company with $1 billion in mobile revenue would lose $2.5 million a month with a 3 percent failure rate. Even losing one one-thousandth of the time is an $82,000 loss.