# Flows

{% hint style="warning" %}
**🚧 Minimum Required SDK Version**

Flows are supported starting iOS SDK v13.0.0
{% endhint %}

Flows gives you a **consolidated view of the health and performance of your app's most important flows**. With simple instrumentation, you can measure the time it takes users to complete key user journeys, understand completion and drop-off rates as well as their root causes, learn what crashes are affecting your flows, and gain insight into the various spans and operations occurring within those flows and their performance.

### Features

#### Flow Summary

<figure><img src="https://files.readme.io/31231c03e8713d9131c4164251d60220ea9dec6d7c9a6b39d9f00b1edcab44f6-ios-app-flows-1.png" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

Flows provides an “at a glance” summary of your flow’s performance and user behavior:

* **Count**: How many times did your users start this flow or user journey?
* **Completion Rate**: How often do your users complete this flow once they start it?
* **Drop-off Rate**: How often do your users abandon this flow mid-way without seeing it to completion? You can also see a breakdown of the drop-off cause, which could be due to:
  * **Crashes**: Your app crashed, preventing your user from completing this flow.
  * **Forced Restarts**: Your users closed the app only to reopen it within 5 seconds. This often indicates that the user faced a frustrating experience and was forced to restart the app to make it go away.
  * **Abandonments**: Users quitting this flow or your app entirely before reaching the end of the flow. An ongoing flow is considered abandoned if the app stays in the background for more than 60 seconds.
* **Time to completion**: Understand how long this flow usually takes your users to complete with P50 (median) and P95 (slowest occurrence that’s not an outlier) insights.

#### Trends

Understand how your flow’s performance changes over time.

* Track your flow’s **Apdex** and **P50** to detect performance regressions,
* Analyze **throughput** to understand user traffic on this flow, or
* View the **distribution** graph to get a wider view of this flow’s performance.

#### Spans

Learn what spans are **most impacting your flow’s** completion time or **introducing latency**.

{% hint style="info" %}
**📘 iOS supports the following span in Flows:**

* Network Requests
* Database Queries
  {% endhint %}

You can learn more about spans and how they can help you identify the root cause of performance issues [here](https://docs.luciq.ai/product-guides-and-integrations/product-guides/application-performance-monitoring/instrumentation).

#### Crashes

Identify the **top crashes affecting users on that flow** that might be causing them to drop off.

#### Patterns

**Understand how your flows are performing across different dimensions**: App versions, Devices, OS versions, etc., or custom flow attributes that you can set yourself, allowing you to **narrow down into segments of your user base** to identify and debug issues.

### Instrumentation

To create a flow, you just need to **define a start and an end for that flow** in your code. Luciq automatically captures data, health, and performance data between those two points. All instances of flows with the same name are aggregated on your dashboard.

{% hint style="info" %}
**🚧 Rules around creating Flows:**

* Flows are **uniquely identified by their name**.
* You **can** run several flows with **different names** in parallel.
* You **can’t** run different instances of the **same flow** in parallel.
* You **can start a flow** while your app is in the **background**.
* You **can’t end a flow** while your app is in the **background**.
* You can create **up to 10,000 unique Flows**.
  {% endhint %}

{% hint style="info" %}
**📘 Rules and Limitations for Custom Flow Attributes:**

* The attribute's **key** can be up to **30 characters**.
* The attribute's **value** can be up to **60 characters**.
* **Avoid** adding any of these **special characters** \[, (, ), =, {, }, <, >, /, , ] (commas not included) as they will be replaced with \_.
* You can add up to **5 unique custom attributes to each flow instance.**
* You can have up to **20 unique custom attribute keys across all instances of a flow.**
* The attribute's key **can't** be an **empty string** or **null**.
* The attribute's value **can't** be an **empty string**.
* You can call the API twice with the same key to override a previous value.
  {% endhint %}


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