For the second day of Velocity Conference 2013, theCube host John Furrier interviewed Doug Sillars, Principal Architect-App Optimization at AT&T, covering mainly the performance of mobile apps and the tools of optimizations.

Sillars, the Mobile Optimization Guru as Furrier called him, revealed that last year AT&T spent 20 bilion dollars on infrastructure.
He laughed that “fixing mobile apps is going to be a job that’s going to keep me busy for a long period of time”. It’s a tough and a fun job, but then again, all challenging jobs are.

“At AT&T we came up with a tool that’s called the Application Resource Optimizer (ARO), which is free and it’s open source”. With this app, AT&T is encouraging developers to make their apps run better. “You can run a network trace on your device, and it tests how your app is doing,” explained Sillars. The tool can tell developers whether or not their apps are caching the images, or killing the users’ batteries and abusing their data plans.

DevOps for Wireless

Furrier agreed that it was an overwhelming task to bring coherence between the problems originating on the carrier side and on the applications side. So he asked Sillars for his input on these issues, as it’s basically DevOps for Wireless.

“I am working with mobile developers to make their apps use the battery and the network more efficiently,” said Sillars. He has a theory that it’s actually the apps that’s causing the battery drain. But users are often tempted to blame the carrier (or the device), and so the carrier’s interest in efficient apps is understandable.

Making the apps run better will make everyone happy. More than that, better apps will make the network faster. Statistically, Sillars said that last year they tested 280 apps, and of those, less than 2 percent needed no optimization. “These are not guys who do not know anything. These are the really, really smart developers,” sighed Sillars. There is obviously room for improvement. “AT&T is trying to show even the best developers there’s room to grow,” clarified Sillars.

For example, they tested Pinterest, the iOs app, and discovered they weren’t caching images properly. “We showed them the trace and they didn’t even know this was happening”. In the next couple of months Pinterest added caching. Sillars takes great pride in that success: “We’re pulling hundreds of terabytes off the network each year; it’s making Pinterest faster, it’s saving Pinterest money, it lowered their server costs, it’s making the network faster and it’s helping everybody in the mobile space who’s using that application.”