10 Tips to Improve Mobile App Performance

10 tips to improve mobile app performance
30Jan, 2021

Have you noticed that your mobile app seems to slow down on certain devices or platforms? This may be because it’s not optimized, or it’s just poorly designed. We have run into many clients that have complained about this very thing and we’ve provided them with several different solutions. We thought that because it’s so common to come across this problem, that it would be a good idea to explore 10 tips to improve mobile app performance. Not all of these may apply to your brand or app, but we think most of them will. So let’s begin.

Optimization

You knew it was coming! Optimization is not just a word that can be bandied around. It has real meaning in the mobile app development world. If you can optimize your app to run on different battery settings, different platforms, different CPU speeds and software, then your app has more chance at reaching and satisfying many more people. Don’t rely on modern smartphone hardware to do the heavy lifting, your app needs to be worth it’s own weight in salt.

Start-up time

You need to improve the launch time for your app. Nobody, and we mean nobody, wants to wait 10-20 seconds for the app to load up before they can use it. It’s no longer excusable to have a slow app, no matter how good it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a game or a running app, it must load within 5-10 seconds.

Eating space

Even though most smartphones have gigantic internal storage and many customers have micro SD cards for additional storage, your app should not be eating a lot of storage space. It’s just not right for your app to be hogging a lot of storage space when users want to use that space to store their selfies and videos.

Eating memory

Your app cannot hog the device’s RAM either. A heavy load app is going to slow the entire phone down. This will limit multitasking and it just annoys the heck out of users. They want to use 2 or 3 apps at a time and if one app is not playing ball, then they will kick it out of their phone.

Eating battery

So you’ve got the first two, i.e. low storage space, low memory usage, but what about battery usage? This is usually caused by the need for more CPU power in order to run it. This is mainly down to the coding. If the CPU has to run a lot of code, it will eventually use more and more battery. You don’t need to be told why this is a concern.

Know your platform

If you are going to be making an app that has brilliant performance, you need to know your platform! If it’s iOS or Android, learn the different pros and cons of the platform for app performance. Android is very flexible but with that, it doesn’t offer a performance safety net, whereas iOS is not as free with it’s coding and thus can give a better performance net to some apps.

Cache and compress

Compress and resize images so they can easily be stored in the app’s folders and have them cached. This not only helps the app to load quicker, but it can allow for multiple profiles to be saved. This also helps to lessen the load on the internal memory and CPU.

Use offline

Always allow your users to use the phone offline. This does mean that it needs to be optimized to be used to some degree offline. Save images, compress data and allow the files and folders to save profiles onto the phone. This allows the app to be operated to some degree. This is great for customers that want to peer through their usage patterns.

Test and test

It should go without saying that testing is the key to finding bugs and hitches that cause the app to slow or crash. It’s the one way where you can really see in real-time, why and or when your app freezes, slows, skips or doesn’t load reliably.

Reuse templates

The fewer templates are needed to store the data, the quicker loading times you will have. So this should be a sticking point in your app design. Don’t design many different templates, just mix it up with different colors, themes, fonts, but keep the design variably the same. It really helps to lighten the load.

Please contact us if you’d like to talk about app performance further. We have lots of clients that have come to us purely to speed up their apps and make them more compatible with different platforms.

Instant Boost AI