PacketZoom set up shop in Southeast Asia to help developers overcome the challenges presented by slow and unreliable network connections by speeding up app content downloads.

The app user experience optimisation company announced plans to open a new sales and support office in Bangalore, India to boost availability of its Mobile Expresslane lightweight software development kit (SDK) in the region.

PacketZoom said the kit enables developers to eliminate roadblocks during the mobile “last mile” and accelerate content delivery by helping them to understand, control and optimise app performance.

“Slow app speed is a major problem throughout India and Southeast Asia, leading to an unfortunate high rate of abandoned and uninstalled apps,” said Shlomi Gian, PacketZoom’s CEO.

“PacketZoom has developed a revolutionary technology to optimise app performance by removing the obstacles that app content faces as it travels across mobile networks,” he added.

App acceleration
PacketZoom said Mobile Expresslane can speed up app performance by to two to three times and “rescues up to 90 per cent of app sessions caused by connection drops.”

The company said its research showed the number of disconnections in several Southeast Asia countries is higher than markets including the US and Japan. For example, 12.1 per cent of downloads are abandoned in Indonesia, 9.9 per cent in Malaysia and 7.3 per cent in India. By contrast, the rate of abandonment in the US and Taiwan stands at around 5 per cent apiece, while in Japan the figure is 3.5 per cent.

PacketZoom already works with make-up retailer Sephora to increase the performance of its shopping app for Southeast Asia, which had been experiencing slow load times caused by latency issues.

After integrating PacketZoom’s Mobile Expresslane, the company claims the Sephora app ran two times faster across 3G, LTE and WiFi networks.

PacketZoom is also already available in China through a partnership with ChinaCache, a provider of Internet content and app delivery services in the country, which holds exclusive rights to deliver PacketZoom’s product.