Crittercism raises $12M to monitor app performance

Mobile support infrastructure company also adds reporting on cloud and network services

(Updated to reflect comment from Crittercism)

Data shows that people have little patience for their apps crashing. Very little. As in, a good percentage will simply delete an app if it crashes for five seconds. Obviously that gives developers a very small window to figure out what the problem is, and a has resulted in a number of app performance companies, who are ready to help developers quickly discover what went wrong.

One of those companies is Crittercism, which has raised $12 million in Series B funding, it was announced Tuesday, to provide developers with a mobile support infrastructure.

The round was led by existing investor Google Ventures, with participation from other existing investors Shasta Ventures and Opus Capital. Wesley Chan, general partner at Google Ventures, will also be joining the board at Crittercism.

Crittercism has now raised a total of $18.7 million. It previously raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and AOL Ventures in June 2011. It then raised a $5.5 million Series A from Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and Google Ventures in June 2012.

"We will utilize the funding to build out the team with plans to double the number of employees to around 60. We'll be putting additional executive hires in place, and we plan to expand our existing product offering to include more functionality to address the growing mobile app performance management market," Andrew Levy, co-founder and CEO of Crittercism, said in an interview with VatorNews. 

In addition to the new funding, the company has also announced a new service which will report on the performance of cloud services and network conditions for Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8, and HTML5 apps.

"Because of our deep understanding of mobile and the challenges and demands that developers, dev ops and operations team face in delivering, monitoring and managing highly reliable, top-performing apps to market, we identified areas within our technology that we can build to help these teams succeed," Levy said.

"Our mobile-first solution will help these teams have visibility into the performance of their apps in the wild. The new service is designed to monitor network conditions as they relate to app performance specifically on mobile devices. These teams will now have real-time view into when cloud services like payments or location services are underperforming or failing so that issues can be quickly remedied."

San Francisco-based Crittercism, which was founded in 2010, offers a real-time global view of app diagnostics and app crashes across  iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Hybrid and HTML5. ItsApplication Performance Management (APM) platform is used on over 450 million unique devices and over 50 billion app sessions.

The company's customers include Nike, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pinterest, Home Depot, Washington Post, Smule, ngmoco:), Shazam, NPR, Urban Outfitters and Sam's Club. 

"We have grown from analyzing 0 to 450 million devices and 0 to 50 billion app launches in 2 years. Our trajectory is extremely steep and will utilize the funds we announced today to accelerate that growth," said Levy.

It was announced in December that Crittercism was partnering up with customer service solution company UserVoice to allow app developers to not only be able to monitor their apps in realtime, but also have the ability to communicate directly with their customers on upcoming upgrades and support issues, all on one single dashboard. All developers have to do is install both Crittercism and UserVoice, and the two apps will be able to detect each other and share data.

Competition

Crittercism is not the only company out there looking to give developers the full story on their apps.

There is Heatma.ps, which launched in October. It gives app developers better insights into how their apps work, including where people touch first, what functions are never used, what gestures people make, scrolling depth, device orientation, user interface layout problems and more.

There is also Apigee, a website that provides an API platform for companies, which announced in Novmber that was launching a new configuration tool called Apigee Mobile Analytics.

Mobile Analytics lets software developers quickly detect, diagnose and fix problems with their apps running on mobile devices in real time. It helps them avoid costly negative user experiences that are caused by application errors and poor app performance.

Even more interesting, though, were the results of its Apigee's 2012 Mobile App Review Survey of over 500 American mobile app users, where the company attempted to find out what the main reasons were that a user would rate an app with one star.

The survey found that fully 96% of American mobile app users say there are frustrations that would lead them to give an app a bad review and 44% of those surveyed said that they would delete the app immediately, and 38% said they would delete the app if it freezes for longer than 30 seconds.

18% of the responders admitted they would even delete an app immediately from their device if it froze for just five seconds.

(Image source: https://www.theverge.com)