Use a CDP to limit third-party code and improve app performance

The time that your app or website takes to load has a significant effect on the user experience. Web.dev reports that performance directly impacts engagement results, citing that the BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.

There are many factors that impact load speed, and anyone that’s offering you a panacea to your performance woes probably also has a used car to sell you.

That said, one common hindrance to performance is having excess third-party code installed in your app. Today, the mobile tech platform landscape has ballooned to over 8,000 solutions, and the average enterprise app now contains 14.8 separate SDKs, all in an effort to provide richer product insights and innovative user experiences. 

When implemented in your app, however, third-party code can lead to excessive TCP network time and slow TLS handshakes, which can have significant impacts on CPU time/usage, network behavior, and client-side performance. Determining the performance impact of third-party SDKs versus native app code can be challenging and time-consuming, often resulting in PMs attributing poor engagement metrics to deficiencies in the native app code instead of the offending third-party code.

You may be asking yourself: But how would a Customer Data Platform, itself another third-party SDK, help here? 

Customer Data Platforms make it possible for you to collect customer data into a single system and forward that data to all of the downstream tools your team is using via server-side integrations. This SDK abstraction allows you to remove any unnecessary vendor SDKs from your codebase, reducing third-party dependencies and improving app stability and load time.

To learn more, you can check out this blog post on improving app performance with SDK testing. Also, check out more topic deep dives in this series to learn more ways in which CDPs directly benefit engineering teams.