One Approach to Monitoring iOS Application Performance
Article Summary
Mercari's iOS team needed to monitor performance without building an entire infrastructure team. Here's how they did it in under a week.
Shinichi Goto from Mercari's engineering team shares their pragmatic approach to tracking iOS app performance metrics like launch time and frame rates. Instead of building everything from scratch or relying solely on Firebase's dashboard, they created a hybrid solution that balances cost and capability.
Key Takeaways
- Used Firebase Performance Monitoring as data source, exported to BigQuery for custom dashboards
- Tracks app start time, frozen frame ratio (frames over 700ms), and binary sizes
- Built Looker dashboard with Slack alerts in less than one week
- Reduced one screen's frozen frame ratio from high levels to 0.90% through targeted fixes
- Weekly automated reports keep entire team aware of performance trends
Small teams can monitor iOS performance effectively by combining Firebase Performance Monitoring with BigQuery and custom dashboards, avoiding the resource drain of building in-house solutions.
About This Article
Mercari's iOS team couldn't see how their app was performing in production. Without dedicated infrastructure engineers, performance problems could slip through unnoticed and hurt their daily active users and retention.
Shinichi Goto's team set up Firebase Performance Monitoring to export data into BigQuery, then built custom Looker dashboards with automated Slack alerts. This let them skip building their own CI infrastructure.
They built and deployed the entire monitoring system in under a week. Now they can track app start traces, frozen frame ratios, and binary sizes. Threshold-based alerts fire across multiple screens when something goes wrong.