Mobile App Smoothness Metrics

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This principle formed the basis for measuring smoothness in the Yandex Maps mobile app. Smoothness is an illusion created by our brain, and it’s fragile: it only takes the app being late by a single frame for the user to notice a micro-freeze.

In this talk, we’ll discuss which metrics actually measure smoothness (and why FPS alone is often not enough) and their strengths and weaknesses. Using these measurements, we identified a specific bottleneck, optimized it, and achieved improvements in product metrics. This talk is for those who want to stop judging “seems smooth” and start improving user experience through measurement.