Written by Pat Enriquez
The reliance on mobile apps has increased in the last decade with more people becoming dependent on mobile devices for everyday convenience. With demand comes supply and looking at both the Google Play Store and the App Store, there are plenty to cater to and satisfy the market.
But one thing that could make or break your future in the industry is app performance. More than anything, app performance is the bread and butter of a mobile app. Poor app performance can mean slow loading time to incompatibility with devices, and many more. These factors can lead to a low app rating that can eventually affect your app downloads.
For the mobile app industry, the most important thing is ensuring app performance is the golden standard.
3 Factors that can affect app performance
1. Platform compatibility
Determine what mobile environment your app can run on. Do you want it to run on both Android and iOS? What devices can use it? What screen sizes can your app accommodate?
These are just a few of the things you need to consider when thinking about device compatibility with your app.
2. App startup time and loading time
Don’t lose potential customers by ensuring your app startup time is under two seconds. No user wants to wait for a long time just to use an app. If it takes too long to load, the user can browse the App Store and find a better alternative.
3. Reasonable battery and memory life
Mobile apps that consume too much battery and memory are a big letdown for many users because it lessens the usability of the mobile phone. Developers need to ensure that their mobile apps are optimized to avoid unnecessary battery and memory drain while the mobile app is running.
5 Ways to Improve App Speed and Performance
1. Cache download images onto the phone’s memory
Store download images onto the device’s hard drive to have access to the data even when network interruption occurs. This also allows the mobile app to generate them directly from its own memory instead of loading them from the network every single time, requiring more work and waiting time for your device.
2. Optimize your images
Images in your mobile app don’t need to be bigger than how they will be presented on the screen.
Compressing images decreases the amount of bytes in an image without affecting its resolution. Resizing means changing the size of an image to fit properly on the screen. Finding the balance between the two is key. Doing both helps eliminate lags and improves loading time.
3. Decrease loading time by up to 2 seconds
Make sure your app gives a good first impression to users by ensuring its loading time is within 2 seconds. You can do this by removing unnecessary resource-intensive tasks that are used upon launching the app.
Anything longer than 2 seconds can force the user to delete the app and search for a better alternative.
4. Keep the code up to date
Always maintain the high-quality code of your app. Delete unused frameworks. Check if there are memory leaks and delete them if you find any.
5. Create an optimized client-server interaction
Design your app in a way that it’ll work in connections slower than 3G. Make use of caching or offline persistence should connections fail. It should also be divided depending on the purpose and requests. Use CDN (content delivery network) to decrease the distance between the user and the source, therefore, reducing load time for your app.
Ready to start working on your app idea? Incorporate these tips into your first app project by learning the basic of iOS development!