Mobile apps often deliver an intolerable user experience, according to a new study from Compuware and reported by TechCrunch. The survey found that 56 percent of respondents had experienced any of several serious problems with mobile apps in the last six months: 62 percent said an app had frozen or reported an error, 47 percent said an app had been slow to launch, and 40 percent said they had experienced an app that simply failed to launch.

This isn’t exactly surprising given the huge number of apps on the market and the wide range of devices some apps are built for. But it’s a problem because publishers have so little insight regarding how their apps are performing in the field. (Compuware is hoping to sell its Application Performance Monitoring software, of course, so it has a dog in this fight.) While publishers have long used crash reports to alert them when an app stops working, deeper information regarding smaller glitches and the causes of problems is often inaccessible. App management has yet to catch up to the explosion in the use of mobile apps. Which is why I expect to see a lot of action here over the next year or so as new solutions come to market.