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What does a gold standard of performance looks like - demo of Arré voice app

· 4 min read
Aditya Kumar
Aditya Kumar
Aditya Kumar

In this post, I want to show the gold standard of how a mobile app should behave, especially on a fluctuating internet connection.

This is the Demo of Arré voice app (https://www.arrevoice.com/). It's a social network over short audio. If I have to oversimplify, it's Twitter for short audio. Check out the video below -

Click here to watch the video on Youtube​

You can see how the app performs with a fluctuating 5G internet connection. Infact, coincidentally, the internet fluctuated from 4G to 5G in between, and you can see how the app gracefully handled that. When I left Arré (in March 2024), the app had a 100% crash-free rate for the last two quarters on both Android and iOS. That is despite the app's primary target audience being Tier 2 and Tier 3 India, where mobile devices are usually not very high-end in terms of processor or memory. These are smartphones under Rs. 10k or 20K.

Even though the app uses multiple databases such as - a NoSQL database (DynamoDB serverless), Cache database (Redis), a Graph database (AWS Neptune), and a Vector database (Astra DB), the performance you see in the video was achieved at less than $10 spent per day on databases at a scale of 3k+ daily active users (250k+ total users. 70k+ MAU). The platform has a macroservices architecture that consistently serves 2000+ RPS across 12 services with a p99 latency of less than 100ms.

Performance is objectively measurable in tech!​

Unlike your brand marketing strategy or an untested GTM strategy, which may or may not be measurable, Measuring the performance and stability of a tech product is very objective. For a mobile app, I define the gold standard of performance as -

  • You have to track the app launch time, and it should be as fast as possible. Arré voice app has less than a second of app launch time.

  • API response time, specifically P99 and P95 latency, should be as low as possible - Arré voice app has P99 of less than 100 milliseconds and P95 of less than 80 milliseconds for every feature on the app - including group messaging and analytics

  • Database query times should be as low as possible. Read latency should be less than ten milliseconds. (For a single query)

  • The crash-free rate should be as high as possible. Arré voice app had a 100% crash-free rate on Android and IOS.

  • The number of bugs users encounter per month should be less than five.

  • The app should have the same performance at any scale for any feature.

  • The cost of all of the above should be as low as possible. If your infrastructure is over-provisioned, you may get a short time gain in performance, but you are setting yourself up for failure when the actual scale hits. Also, you are just hurting your bottom line.

There are several open-source and closed-source tools for measuring all the above, and if you have a well-funded company and team, I can't think of a single reason not to do it.

I can go on and on, but you get the point​

The scale here doesn't matter. In my previous organization Leher App , we served a peak DAU of 250K+ with similar stats in terms of stability and performance. The point I am trying to make is —this is possible.

If your app is performing any less than this, you are just making a compromise. I achieved all this with a small team of 7 developers and zero QAs. And I if you want a similar end-user experience and objectively good stats in speed and performance, use this link to schedule a call with me (click here).

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