Another

1. AT&T Application Resource Optimizer (ARO)
A Guide for Developers
Doug Sillars
Bill Weir
April 2015

2. Mobile Development Is Challenging
There are a lot of issues to consider…
 19,000 Android User Agents reported by Akamai
 There are Screen Size differences
 Processor/Memory constraints
 Battery constraints
 And there are constraints inherent in Wireless Networks
It isn’t easy!

3. Don’t Let Users Do Your Quality Control
44% of all issues are reported by users
20% issues were only found because of complaints in app reviews
34% of Users use ratings as primary influence in choosing an app
http://info.perfectomobile.com/rs/perfectomobile/images/why-apps-fail-infographic.pdf

4. Users Expect Things to Just Work
This was an actual tweet.

5. Defects vs. Performance
Is Performance REALLY that important? Yes!
https://t.co/7bMT4A1PIt

6. Top App Complaints from Consumers
1.User Interface Issues (58%)
2.Performance (52%)
3.Functionality (50%)
4.Device Compatibility (45%)

7. Performance Importance?
How Important is Speed and Responsiveness of Mobile Apps?
https://t.co/7bMT4A1PIt
From a Mobile
User Survey
conducted by
Dimensional
Research

8. How Fast Should an App Startup?
72%
<3 seconds
49%
<2 seconds
91%
<4 seconds
https://t.co/7bMT4A1PIt
From a Mobile
User Survey
conducted by
Dimensional
Research

9. Reactions to Poor Performance

10. Check Your App’s Performance
http://smarterappsguidelines.gsma.com/
http://knowmyapp.org/
http://www.appqualityalliance.org/aqua-performance-test-criteria
http://developer.att.com/application-resource-optimizer
http://tspace.web.att.com/files/app#/file/9ecf48ae-b5f7-4780-8672-8c53520c1fb3
Here Are Some Guidelines:

11. You Can Test Performance With ARO
 ARO Background
 ARO Manual Test (Demo!)
 ARO Analysis
 ARO Automation (NEW!)

12. Find The Issues Early With ARO
ARO Records and Analyzes Network Interactions of App
Network use
accounts for
40-70% of
battery drain!

13. ARO Requirements
• Open Source and Free
Developer.att.com/ARO
• Required for AT&T Preload apps
• iOS
- Requires iOS device tethered to Mac (with Xcode)
• Android
- Requires Android device tethered to Mac/PC (with
Android SDK)

14. Testing Your App With ARO
1. Move at a speed that emulates real users
2. Create flexible (yet reproducible) test cases
a. Test cases can even reflect more of a feature checklist
b. The Trace is not about the order of the features, but about the content
3. Likely Problem Areas
a. Startup
b. Streaming
4. Be Curious
a. If something seems odd, explore it
b. Screen rotation best practice came out of tester noticing the network
lighting up each time they turned the device
5. Background Data:
a. Run long test with app running in background

15. Live Demo of ARO Test

16. Demo Backup Slides
In ARO Analyzer App:
Start Data collector
Name the test
Capture Video or not

17. Demo Backup Slides
ARO establishes a VPN
connection on your Android
Device (click ok)
ARO shows Screen on your
computer (if video is being
recorded)
Click Stop to end ARO trace
Files copied to PC and
analyzed

18. ARO Analysis
All network traffic
mapped to processes
Stats about trace

19. Best Practices

20. ARO Simple Analysis
5 Best Practices Graded for Preloads:
1. Text File Compression
2. Duplicate Content
3. Closing Connections
4. Periodic Connections
5. GPS/Bluetooth

21. © 2015 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies. All other marks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Information contained herein is not an offer, commitment, representation or warranty by AT&T and is subject to change. Mention of a specific
company or entity is not an endorsement by AT&T.
AT&T Defect Metrics
Duplicate
Content
<5% of KB
5-20% of KB
20+% of KB
Periodic
Connections
0-20% of Power
20-50% of
Power
50+% of Power
GPS/BT
0-25% Active
(s)
25-65% Active
(s)
65+% Active
(s)
Text
Compression
100-500KB
500-1000KB
1000+KB
Closing
Connections
0-20% of Power
20-50% of
Power
50+% of Power
Sev 3
Sev 2
Sev 1

22. © 2015 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies. All other marks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Information contained herein is not an offer, commitment, representation or warranty by AT&T and is subject to change. Mention of a specific
company or entity is not an endorsement by AT&T.
Duplicate Content
AT&T preload says <5% is a pass.
This 2.8 KB file should be cached for 1 year. yet
downloaded twice in ~2 minutes.

23. Download Less Stuff: Caching
17% of HTTP content on mobile is duplicate data
– Reading from Cache is 75-99% faster than
downloading again
“Web Caching on Smartphones: Ideal vs. Reality”,
http://www.research.att.com/~sen/pub/Caching_mobisys12.pdf
6.7MB 6.7MB
4.8 MB duplicate!
75% possible
savings!
(data AND speed)

24. Caching Methods (How do I do it?)
ETags
Cache Control Headers
•Each file has a Unique Tag
•Revalidated on server for each request
– High Performance Web Sites:
Rule 1 – Make Fewer HTTP Requests (1)
– Adding a connection drains battery,
adds 500-3,000 ms latency
•Important to carefully assign Max-Age times
•App will not check file on server until Max-Age
is reached
– Retrieval is strictly file processing time
(1) http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2007/04/rule_1_make_few/

25. Comparing ETag vs. Cache Control
Network Usage Battery Drain Data Usage Speed
NO Cache
YES entire file
downloaded
Full network
connection made
High Slowest
ETag
Yes – ETag in cache
is validated on server
Full network
connection
Low Slow
Cache Control No N/A N/A Fast
Any Caching is better than no caching, but for mobile, Cache Control is preferred

26. Closing Connections
< 20% Sev 3 defect
Blue Burst Color indicates
Packets closing connections

27. Closing Connections: CODE
MultiRes Sample app from Android SDK
– Modified to download images
HttpURLConnection getimagecloseconn = (HttpURLConnection)
urln.openConnection();
getimagecloseconn.setRequestProperty("connection", "close");
getimagecloseconn.connect();
String cachecontrol = getimagecloseconn.getHeaderField("Cache-Control");
InputStream isclose = getimagecloseconn.getInputStream();
bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(isclose);
getimagecloseconn.disconnect();
https://github.com/attdevsupport/ARO/tree/master/2013DevSummitTurbocharge

28. GPS/Bluetooth
< 25% Sev 3 defect
Green Color Indicates
active GPS usage

29. © 2015 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies. All other marks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Information contained herein is not an offer, commitment, representation or warranty by AT&T and is subject to change. Mention of a specific
company or entity is not an endorsement by AT&T.
GPS: AT&T DriveMode for Android
3 min
480 GPS connections/24hr
~20% Battery

30. © 2015 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies. All other marks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Information contained herein is not an offer, commitment, representation or warranty by AT&T and is subject to change. Mention of a specific
company or entity is not an endorsement by AT&T.
GPS: AT&T DriveMode for Android
Use activity APIs to identify when your users are in
motion
11 minute trace
DetectedActivity.IN_VEHICLEDetectedActivity.ON_BICYCLE:DetectedActivity.ON_FOOT:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baby_goats_jan_2007_crop.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goat_in_a_car.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2009_goat_and_bicycle_in_India_6512003001.jpg

31. © 2015 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies. All other marks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Information contained herein is not an offer, commitment, representation or warranty by AT&T and is subject to change. Mention of a specific
company or entity is not an endorsement by AT&T.
Periodic Connections:
• We have a great new service
• But we need to poll every 30 seconds
• Is this bad for the network?
AT&T Sample App

32. © 2015 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies. All other marks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Information contained herein is not an offer, commitment, representation or warranty by AT&T and is subject to change. Mention of a specific
company or entity is not an endorsement by AT&T.
AT&T Sample App (cont.)
• 2 concurrent connections
• Extra Network utilization
• If your capacity is set on # of connections – it just got halved

33. © 2015 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies. All other marks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Information contained herein is not an offer, commitment, representation or warranty by AT&T and is subject to change. Mention of a specific
company or entity is not an endorsement by AT&T.
AT&T Sample App (cont.)
• Moved to persistent connection – is this better?
• 10 minutes = 20 connections 0.67% of battery
• 1 hour =120 connections 4% of battery
• 24 hours = 2880 connections 96.7% of battery

34. Text Compression
> 1MB% Sev 1 defect

35. Periodic Connections in the Background!
Background traffic
Many Apps wake up in the background to update data or
communicate with servers.
Just 10 background connections = 0.5% battery/day
And it adds up FAST!
Look at Android’s JobScheduler API (5.0 and up)

36. Background Traffic
AT&T Corp Email
Facebook
Exercise app

37. ARO Automation – Headless collection
Beta product: release planned July 2015
Command Line and Java APIs to run ARO
./aro --startcollector vpn_android --output /users/demo/MCoC_testing --video yes

38. ARO Automation – Analysis
• Open trace in Analyzer tool
• Analyze headlessly into JSON or HTML
./aro --analyze /users/demo/MCoC_testing --output
/users/demo/MCoC_testing/report.html --format html

39. ARO for Developers
• Performance testing is crucial
• Good tools and test plans are essential
• AT&T Application Resource Optimizer (ARO)
• Testing manually
• Testing with automation
• Analysis and filing bugs

40. © 2015 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies. All other marks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Information contained herein is not an offer, commitment, representation or warranty by AT&T and is subject to change. Mention of a specific
company or entity is not an endorsement by AT&T.
Q&A
http://smarterappsguidelines.gsma.com/
http://knowmyapp.org/
http://www.appqualityalliance.org/aqua-performance-test-criteria
http://developer.att.com/application-resource-optimizer
http://bit.ly/HighPerfAndroidApps