How to Enhance the Performance of your React Native Mobile Application
Over the last few years, React Native has escalated the mobile app development to an unprecedented level. It turned into a boon for businesses by enabling them to rationalize costs, facilitate market penetration, and develop highly responsive user experience. These advantages have been impactful enough to steer big brands like Facebook, Instagram, Walmart, Tesla, Uber, and more towards React Native app development. Furthermore, this framework has also stimulated SMEs to hire React Native app developers and yield these benefits.
Since building an app, testing it, optimizing it and launching it are the keys to creating a consistent user experience, below are some of the powerful ways to improve the performance of your app and get the most out of it.
Include only necessary features
A long feature list may cause your application to suffer slow display times. If you want your app to perform swiftly, eliminate all the unnecessary data, animations, controls, tabs, and navigations. Make sure to display the required features only as they have the potential to expand the display times of your app and result in cluttered user experience. A lean architecture will help your app fly.
Focus on app launch time
If your app’s launch time is too slow, users won’t give your app a single chance. The key reason for this issue is object.finalize. Finalizers run on the main thread and can lead to error messages that show your app is running out of memory, even when there is enough RAM available. This is one of the primary reasons for the high launch times of your React Native app. To avert these issues, avoid using Object Finalizers and running essential components on the main thread.
Prevent memory leaks
Memory leaks have always been a critical issue in Android devices, which often happen when too many unwanted processes run in the background. In these issues, the application is closed while the memory isn’t released, and hence, in the next launch, additional memory allocates.
One of the best ways to overcome memory leakage is to use scrolling lists like SectionList, FlatList, or VirtualList, instead of ListView. These listing components will prevent memory leakage, provide smooth scrolling, and optimize the overall performance of your React Native mobile application.
Reduce app size
Most apps built using JavaScript use native components along with some third-party libraries. Higher the number of components and libraries, the larger the app size. To reduce the app size, ask the experts of the React Native App Development Company you hired to use only essential components, optimize them, reduce graphics size, and use an optimizer like ProGuard. Reducing the app size will also reduce its download time and improve its performance considerably.
Use rendering carefully
Excessive component rendering can impact the performance of your app negatively. To avoid such cases, do not incorporate different state of the props and life cycles. It is vital to ensure that the reconciler is not overloaded with unwanted work. This can decrease the per second output of JavaScript thread’s frames, which may reduce the app’s speed.
Simplify JSON structure
Mobile apps fetch data from the remote server using private/public API. This data is basically in JSON format and may comprise compound nested objects. Since JavaScript renders the data slowly, React Native app developers tend to store the JSON data locally so as to access and retrieve it any time. This leads to performance bottlenecks. This why the conversion of raw JSON into simpler components before rendering is recommended, which will avoid such issues.
Optimize images
Images consume a significant part of your app memory. To enhance the app performance, optimize the size of the images using services like TinyPNG before using them in the app. Besides, we recommend using web format for JPG and PNG files to improve app loading speed up to 28% and reduce iOS and Android binary sizes by 25%.
Reduce bridge load
The JavaScript side connects with the Native side through a bridge in a React Native mobile app. If this bridge has an excessive load, the performance of the app deteriorates. Reducing the bridge load facilitates effective communication, which further improves the overall performance of the app. The proven way of achieving this is by testing the dependability of an open-source library before using it. You can also control the movement of components on the main thread because they utilize heavy message queues to connect with the Native side.
Conclusion
React Native is a complex platform in terms of its architecture and different libraries, components, and Native Modules. But, ever since its inception, a plethora of organizations have trusted this framework to develop their apps as it is rewarding in many aspects. If you’re also devising to Hire React Native App Developers to give a mobile presence to your business, take these issues and their countermeasures into account before embarking on your cross-platform app development journey.
