NimbleDroid

NimbleDroid was an application performance testing company founded in 2013 by Junfeng Yang, a computer science professor at Columbia University, and his PhD student, Younghoon Jeon. The venture originated from their work in Yang's Software Systems Lab, where they developed the core technology to address the prevalent issue of sluggish mobile applications. Yang, who disliked the manual debugging process, aimed to automate the task of finding and fixing performance bottlenecks using program analysis.

The company provided automated performance analysis and testing for Android applications, targeting developers and engineering teams. Its primary service involved a tool that developers could use by simply uploading their Android application package (APK). NimbleDroid would then run the app in a monitored device cloud to conduct a comprehensive analysis of its performance, measuring metrics like speed, memory usage, network data consumption, and disk usage across different builds. The platform could pinpoint slow code, detect performance regressions as they were introduced, and even suggest fixes for identified issues. This service was designed to be used without requiring an SDK installation, simplifying the process for developers. The company catered to high-profile clients such as PayPal, eBay, Yahoo, The New York Times, and Pinterest.

The technology proved effective, with The New York Times using it to reduce their app's startup time from 5.6 seconds to 1.6 seconds. The company secured funding through grants, including $225,000 from the National Science Foundation in 2016 and $1.41 million in 2017. In March 2019, NimbleDroid was acquired by HeadSpin, a mobile performance platform, for an undisclosed amount. Following the acquisition, the entire NimbleDroid team joined HeadSpin, with Junfeng Yang becoming Chief Scientist and Younghoon Jeon being named a Fellow, integrating NimbleDroid's client-side testing capabilities into HeadSpin's broader platform. Keywords: mobile app performance, Android testing, automated debugging, application performance monitoring, APK analysis, performance regression testing, mobile development tools, code profiling, startup time optimization, memory usage analysis, network consumption, HeadSpin, Junfeng Yang, Younghoon Jeon, Columbia University, Android profiler, client-side testing, app performance management, mobile user experience, performance bottleneck detection