Destination: Scale 2021

I have a personal vendetta against “dashboards.” Not because they're not useful—I actually think they’re extremely useful—but rather because they're generally built with the wrong user in mind, then used by a completely different user, and for a different use case. 

You shipped your latest release. You tested it on emulators, QA devices, and the latest OS versions. But now it’s live and running on thousands or millions of real devices, across a jungle of screen sizes, hardware specs, OS versions, and network conditions. A user reports a crash on an old Samsung device over 3G. Someone else complains the app feels “sluggish” after updating. You dig through logs. Rebuild test cases. Ping the backend team. Try to reproduce. Yet, still no answers.

There are certain important metrics that every mobile app has in common. At Honeycomb, we have surveyed these metrics across iOS and Android, and have defined a set of Core Mobile Vitals we think every app developer should care about. The purpose of these vitals is similar to that of Core Web Vitals for web frontends.