The mobile app industry continues to grow in size, complexity, and competition. Also not slowing down? Consumer expectations are rising exponentially along with the use of mobile apps.

To meet these expectations, mobile teams need to take a comprehensive, holistic approach to their app experience. Simply being crash-free is no longer enough; mobile apps must consistently deliver a stable, high-performance user experience.

The 2024 edition of Instabug's Mobile App Stability Outlook leverages partnerships with the leading mobile teams globally to take a deep dive into the stability and performance of the world's top mobile apps. The report looks far beyond average crash rates and includes mobile-specific metrics on non-fatal stability incidents to accurately depict the current state of mobile app stability and user experience.

The core takeaways confirm our constant drumbeat that quality — defined by an app's performance and stability — is the single most important feature of any mobile app.

To that end, our benchmarking emphasizes a critical insight that shouldn't surprise mobile teams: the most successful apps are also the most performant. There's a reinforcing mechanism in play — high-performing apps keep consumers engaged and are used more frequently while setting the standard for every other app users interact with.

Apps that meet or exceed consumers' expectations are the ones that will be successful in the highly competitive mobile landscape.

App Stability Is Just the Beginning

The 2024 report acknowledges the strong link between app stability and app store success. Users expect a phenomenal app experience, demonstrating little tolerance for instability. Crashes or performance upsets have a direct and unequivocal impact on ratings and reviews.

This year, the median crash-free session rate increased slightly to 99.95%, setting a new bar for app stability. High-performing mobile apps consistently hit "five nines" (99.999%) stability, solidifying that as the target for successful apps.

A crash-free app experience is only the beginning. Mobile users often express dissatisfaction with non-fatal stability issues in app store ratings and reviews, stressing the importance of a holistic approach toward stability and overall performance. Crashes are just one aspect of mobile app stability; other stability metrics like application not responding (ANR) errors, out-of-memory (OOM) errors and app hangs must also be considered to represent the user experience accurately.

Mobile teams must consider the full breadth of app performance, reinforcing the need for mobile-specific application performance management (APM) tools that go beyond measuring fatal app crashes. To measure real user experience and ensure apps meet high expectations, mobile teams require tools that capture the user's complete experience.

Top Apps Determine User Expectations

Therefore, developers must push their business and engineering leaders to provide the tools to scale mobile app development's maturity curve, which starts with ensuring your app doesn't crash and ends with meeting users' expectations — determined by some of the best mobile apps in the world. Apps like Uber, Instagram, and TikTok are setting your users' expectations, and if your app isn't performing to its fullest potential, you'll have your work cut out for you on that maturity curve.

Regardless of your industry — banking, travel, lifestyle, retail, etc. — you're competing on your app's performance. Like it or not, app quality is no longer a nice-to-have — it's a prerequisite.

This year's report breaks down a broader range of industries and includes apps in the lifestyle/sports, social/dating, telecom, travel/airlines, and staffing/recruitment industries. At the top of the stability chart is the health/fitness industry, with a median of 99.98% crash-free sessions, followed closely by social/dating and telecom at 99.97%. Lagging behind is the lifestyle/sports industry, with a median crash-free rate of 99.67%.

The best apps in the world rarely experience crashes and consistently deliver a stable and performant user experience. They are significantly outpacing their competitors — which includes not just others in the same industry but every other app available on Google or Apple app stores. Apps not consistently hitting those "five nines" need to improve by investing in the right mobile app quality tooling.

It's worth noting that the differences between iOS and Android apps are not relevant to their performance rating. While both Google and Apple stores are gated regarding which apps are allowed in, Apple is a bit more stringent in its quality demands. It won't allow an app that crashes at a high-frequency level into the store — which is why its apps have a better crash rate. However, both stores are ramping up those quality gates, and becoming less tolerant of apps that don't meet user expectations.

The bar is higher than ever and mobile teams must ensure they keep up.

AI is playing a significant role in that effort. The report highlights that AI-driven automation tools will increasingly be critical in boosting app stability benchmarks. AI assistants can enable mobile development teams to understand the patterns driving crashes or other performance problems.

We are part of a new era in mobile app development, driven by AI's predictive power and real-time data analysis. The future of mobile stability is not just about your app's crash-free sessions, but about developing hype-responsive, self-healing, zero-maintenance apps powered by advanced AI.