In the competitive market, product managers desire to build and launch performance-rich applications and influence a wider audience. Low latency and distorted frames annoy end-users and lead to a poor user impression. Hence, it is necessary to choose a feature-rich framework that enables managers to build and run smooth applications across platforms. Many tech enthusiasts vouch for React Native as the most reliable cross-platform framework that offers greater flexibility and agility.
React Native is most flexible in handling heavy elements that eat more memory. The applications built using this framework have proven to be lighter in size and consume nominal processing power which is a favorable aspect. However, this framework comes with its problems, particularly in the context of performance. React Native application’s performance is impacted drastically due to the lack of parallel processing and restrictions for animation support. Moreover, the heavy-lifting interactions might impact the speed and overall performance.
So, is this the end of React Native? Not at all! The community has been able to identify ways to optimize the performance and make the applications fail-proof.
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Impact of React Native Application Performance on User Experience
In general, around 70% of mobile users will abandon an app when it takes much time to load. Community experts mention that React Native apps with a two-second response delay can lead to an 8% loss in user conversion. Moreover, one in every three React Native apps are uninstalled within the first week of download. This indicates that app performance can make or break a business presence since it’s directly related to sustained utilization and user retention.
When it comes to React Native application performance, it’s not just about checking device and network performance. App creators need to consider the amount of processing power the app uses, rendering duration, and how fast it reacts to user commands. It is true that failing to provide a frictionless user experience is most likely due to poorly optimized client-side elements, like inappropriate data loading or image utilization. Undeniably, React Native app optimization requires both the device and system at peak performance levels.
Common React Native Performance Issues Faced by App Creators
Unlike other cross-platform frameworks, React Native doesn’t separate the business logic and interface layers. This means that app handlers may be unable to apply their existing learning curve to build apps. Tech leaders embarking on React Native mobile app development must understand coding and layering techniques to ensure minimal conflicting patterns and coding gaps.
Here are some performance issues that creators are likely to face with React Native development:
- React Native app’s APK size is bigger when compared to the other development frameworks. Consequently, app creators will notice that it uses more CPU space, obtains a huge memory area, and can slow down the device.
- Achieving CPU-intensive performance is challenging since React Native is slower in execution than native languages like Objective-C and Swift
- Typically, developers tend to use multiple widgets for animation or other development aspects. These widgets add up overhead and hinder performance. Creators might need to classify the widgets and incorporate them tactically into their applications.
- Though the interfacing happens via V8 engine, app creators might observe UI breaks, which can be categorized as slow performance
- Using large image assets or other graphic elements with asynchronous loading properties might also be responsible for the poor React Native performance
In addition, the unavailability of upgrades in OS versions on React Native SDK could prove to be a disadvantage in the development context. This can impact the overall performance. For instance, React Native SDK doesn’t intuitively support Metal API and OpenGL. This can impact development capabilities and performance traits.
5 Proven Techniques to Optimize React Native Application Performance
Item Windowing
React Native-based apps comprise lists and multiple visual elements. App managers must ensure that the user interface does not crash or lag, regardless of the data quantity the lists or visual elements display. To achieve it, displaying lists of simple text is not just enough. It’s because modern applications include interactive elements along with lists, like hover effects and buttons that are expensive to render. All these elements can quickly worsen the performance, even when rendering data of moderate size.
That’s why app creators should embrace the concept of ‘Windowing’. This technique ensures that both interactive elements and lists only display items detectible in the viewport. Displaying DOM elements is one of the most effective operations React Native applications perform, and with item windowing, developers can ensure that they render them only when required. The concept behind windowing is similar to recycling, where developers can lower the volume of DOM elements the app lists generate. Item windowing is more effective compared to recycling since developers don’t need to erase and recreate virtual elements each time.
Using Navigation Libraries
There are instances where end-users face trouble in navigating React Native applications. Navigation glitches considerably prevent apps from delivering users an impeccable experience. Fortunately, the React Native community offers a range of libraries like Navigation Experiment, React Navigation, and iOS Navigator to address the complexities.
These libraries simplify and modernize the navigation implementation in React Native solutions. With intuitive functions like stack, drawer, and tab navigators, developers can easily organize the app’s content cogently. The navigation library’s customizable and declarative API allows app architects to describe navigation flows that cater to the process requirements. Developers from a recognized React Native app development company perform deep linking, enabling users to access app interfaces straight from URLs or external links.
Setting up Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
A Content Delivery Network can help app architects optimize the scalability and performance of their React Native application. It helps to record and manage copies of static elements such as images, CSS files, and JavaScript, on client-side servers that are distributed across the world. This ensures that app users can view graphical assets quickly, irrespective of the location and network status. Furthermore, setting up CDN helps app managers to minimize the load on their data servers, making it more scalable and efficient.
App creators must also make sure that their React Native application’s database is optimized for scalability and performance. When there are any redundant queries or tables that can be detached, developers should do so. Ensure that the code queries are programmed efficiently and only extract the necessary data from end-users. This helps in reducing the load on the database and makes applications more performant.
Let’s look at the case study of Nielsen, a US-based leading market research firm. They were already working with an app (built using React Native) that is used for internal collaboration. However, they encounter challenges while trying to retrieve past data recorded on this app for stakeholder analysis. With the help of dedicated React Native experts, they were able to set up a secondary CDN and retrieved around 50TB of data within days. Moreover, the database optimization practices implemented by developers help in increasing app performance by up to 91%.
Removing Idle Code Resources and Modules
After deployment, product owners should assess the React Native apps and remove unused graphic modules and code. This contributes to improving app performance. The application consumes minimal processing power to compile and execute the code. When the user requests any data or service, the app easily offers the output within a minimal duration. Hence, the performance of a React Native app is enhanced by deleting idle modules.
Moreover, eliminating unutilized elements helps in minimizing the cyber-attack possibilities. When developers compile only the required codebase, the possibility of security loopholes and vulnerabilities in applications gets reduced. It eliminates the attackers from breaching end-user data and obtaining unauthorized access. Hence, app managers must always review the code security and publish only the required codebase.
Implementing Caching
Caching is meant to be an ever-green technique for optimizing the performance of React Native applications. Developers can apply cache mechanisms on React Native applications since it helps to load the static visual elements more quickly than before. The cache memory records the most demanded pages and promptly delivers them when the end-user requests them.
This way, the graphic contexts get loaded swiftly, and the user retains the mobile application. React Native ecosystem supports multiple caching mechanisms and efficiently reuses computed data or graphic elements. One of the most popular mechanisms for React Native apps is Redis since it is transient in nature and data requests are handled faster. When tech leaders hire skilled developers from offshore React Native app development services providers, they can use various caching for app performance optimization. Developers help in increasing the application’s data retrieval performance by lessening the necessity to access the core storage layer.
Closing Thoughts
To augment the performance of a React Native mobile app, product managers must stick to proven practices. Implementation of caching, usage of navigation libraries, removal of isolated modules, and configuration of delivery networks must be on the list. As an alternative, tech leaders can hire offshore React Native developers to leverage new releases or enhancements to boost application performance. The performance will radically improve when managers align the app with reliable practices.
