Application performance-management solution provider New Relic today launched New Relic for Mobile Apps, a new native mobile application performance monitoring service.

New Relic, a real-time, SaaS-based solution, provides application performance management for Java, .NET, PHP, Python and Ruby Web applications, and it has now been extended to include Android and iOS mobile apps. The company said there were no plans to support the BlackBerry platform, and that the service might support Microsoft’s mobile platform sometime in the future.

The company said New Relic for Mobile Apps lets developers see where the performance problems originate in their mobile apps. The company said that developers spend too much time trying to figure out where problems are in the code. Or, worse, they are unaware of performance problems that their mobile applications are having.

The company pointed out how users sometimes only use their apps once and never again, but developers can be blind to that. The user experience is key, the company said, and so it’s important for developers to know how their apps are performing.

“The whole goal [of our company in the past] was to support really any languages that Web apps would be built in,” said Chris Cook, cofounder and COO of New Relic. “And so we’ve got this really broad product set, which are languages in which a lot of mobile apps are being written.”

Cook thinks this is important because there are more than a million and a half apps that are in play right now. He said he has seen studies that show that users have about, on average, 41 apps. “The reality is, one out of every four apps that are downloaded gets used one time and then gets abandoned,” he said.

“We believe that one of the primary reasons for that is that the customer has a bad experience, for whatever reason. It could be just a crummy app or it could be bad performance or, for whatever reason, it didn’t do what the consumer thought it would do.”

A lot of companies are trying to differentiate themselves through mobile or find new sources of revenue, Cook said. “We had a meeting…with the CEO of eBay. One of the things that we learned, which I thought was pretty interesting, is that they sell 10,000 cars a week through cell phones. I just thought, ‘That’s a pretty awesome mobile app right there.’ I mean, I didn’t even think to buy a car through a cell phone, but they’re selling 10,000 of them a week through mobile.”

But the reality is, companies often have little insight into how their apps are performing, according to Cook. There are many errors inside these apps that no one can see, he said. “One of the things we learned—from the 80 companies that are in our beta process—has been that they’re blown away by how many errors there are in their apps that they didn’t even know were there. Things like HTTP errors and 400 errors and things like that,” he said.

Cook said developers will be able to see if their apps are performing better on AT&T, Telstra, Verizon or Vodafone, for example. They will also be able to see where they are getting the most uptake. “If you have five times more uptake on Verizon than you do on AT&T, we’ll be able to tell you why that is and if there are performance reasons that are causing that,” he said.