Mobile apps have become the primary gateway for e-commerce in India with 81% of consumers using smartphones or mobile devices to make purchases. However, as digital interactions continue to become faster and more frictionless, user patience is declining. Even small delays, crashes, or errors can cause immediate user drop-offs, creating pressure on businesses to maintain consistent high performance.
Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Asia-Pacific and Japan
New Relic
State of Ecommerce in India report found that 60% of users would exit an app if it took more than 10 seconds to load. With little tolerance for delays, even momentary performance issues in apps can result in cart abandonment, loss of revenue, and reputational damage.
It’s for these reasons that mobile app monitoring has become mission critical for digital businesses. It provides real-time visibility into app performance, stability, and user experience, while helping teams detect and fix issues before users are impacted.
The Changing Dynamics of Digital Interactions
Consumers today have a wide range of choices and little patience for error. With e-commerce in India projected to reach US$163 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of 27%, competition is intensifying, especially during high-demand periods such as Diwali, Holi, and Christmas. These peak events present invaluable opportunities for retailers, but also bring mounting pressure on developers to ensure that applications operate reliably and fulfil consumer expectations under heavy load.. Crashes alone account for 71% of app uninstalls, reiterating the critical need for robust performance monitoring. The growing expectations and thinning-patience of consumers highlights the need for retailers to prioritise uptime, responsiveness, and availability across mobile applications. Organisations that invest in scalable and resilient digital infrastructure are better positioned to maintain a competitive edge.
If a retailer’s technology stack cannot manage traffic spikes or ensure consistent performance, it can lead to degraded user experience, failed transactions, or downtime, directly affecting revenue and consumer trust.
Ensuring Mobile App Stability Through End-to-End Observability
The competitive nature of the digital world demands a best-of-breed observability platform that offers businesses a unified view of their entire technology stack. Consolidated visibility across all shopping touchpoints helps eliminate the risks associated with siloed monitoring tools. This ensures stable, seamless consumer experiences throughout every stage of app interaction.
The advanced monitoring capabilities of observability tools also allow developers to track custom metrics and collaborate seamlessly with backend teams, helping optimise performance, accelerate issue resolution, and improve overall user satisfaction. This includes real-time monitoring of mobile applications to proactively detect crashes, performance issues, and errors, which reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR), minimises disruptions, and ensures a consistently smooth user experience. AI-strengthened observability platforms also provide in-depth insights into user interactions, helping identify performance bottlenecks, and optimising critical application areas. By addressing issues early, businesses can improve performance, reduce app abandonment, and protect revenue.
In addition, a robust observability platform allows teams to adopt a proactive approach to error detection, identifying and resolving potential issues before they impact end users. With shared visibility into metrics such as network performance and response times, cross-functional teams can prioritise fixes based on user impact and collaborate more effectively to maintain performance and availability. This creates a balanced response to technical incidents, minimising user disruption while preserving application stability and business continuity.
Choosing a proactive strategy for long lasting impact
For India’s e-commerce players, success hinges not only on user acquisition but also on the sustained reliability of apps. As mobile applications become the front door to retail engagement, observability is pivotal in maintaining consistent service quality across every transaction.
AI-strengthened observability enables businesses to proactively identify, diagnose, and resolve issues fast, enhancing user experience and minimising churn. It also ensures greater app stability and helps achieve improved product and business outcomes. In a space where milliseconds matter, the retailers who invest in full-stack visibility will be the ones who stay ahead.
Attributed by Rob Newell, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Asia-Pacific and Japan