You feel like you’re doing everything. You know your mobile app development needs to be Agile, and you’re behind it 100%. It is also possible that your mobile application may not work properly and start hanging due to certain problems. That problem might occur due to the problem in programming or working with the application. There are so many reasons that make a mobile application unable to work properly.

The following would drastically impact the quality of your mobile application:

• Application size
• Application performance
• Platform-specific guidelines
• Architecture design

Now, let’s see how you can optimize each of them to make your application faster in simple, easy to follow steps.

1. Minimize the application size

Mobile phones aren’t powerful GPUs, yet! Also, do you know that most of the Android market share is consumed by low-end configuration mobile phones? Some of them don’t even support 2G or 3G, even downloading your huge application in a moment need would be a nightmare for the app’s users. The less your app consumes space on such constrained phones, the better.

2. Text first, image second

To optimize networking, try to load textual data first. Image-based content present in your application can then be loaded as the second preference, asynchronously.

3. Avoid duplicate network requests

Those who are familiar with Volley in Android will know a lot about this. When poorly implemented that android app using Volley can send two requests to the server at the same time, you might delete an item, it will get deleted, but your app would say, no such item exists. Not only just the functionality, but duplicated requests increase system congestion and decrease app’s performance, especially when you have a million app users. Imagine increasing the number of requests to your server increased by 2 folds when you are extremely desperate to optimize these costs.

4. Understand and adjust based on connection quality

Think about an app that adjusts everything based on the network quality available. Your app should be easy and fast to load. Your app can change the content quality delivered based on what network conditions a user is present in to make sure that the app’s usage doesn’t fall through.

5. Effective API design

The way an API has been designed has a huge impact on how it impacts app’s performances. An incomplete or lazily designed API can be a burden on the mobile application. Workarounds on APIs usually put too much pressure on the network limitations.

When designing the API payloads of your mobile app ensure that you have:

• Consistency: The developer should know that expect, leaving no space for least astonishment.
• Completeness: Having reduced workarounds

6. Optimize images in your application

To optimize images in your application, you can do the following things:

• Use vector images
• Serve dynamic image sizes
• Apply color filters as opposed to using different sets of colored images
• Use image caching
• Use libraries like Picasso and Fresco

7. Make sure you optimize your app for screen size as well

A lot has been spoken about the screen sizes, Android raises some really big concerns here as there are literally thousands of devices, each with their own resolution and screen size.

As a rule of thumb:

• Build for small and medium screens
• Optimize for MDPI and HDPI
• Implement adaptive UI flows

Don’t have a 100’s of devices to test the screen size and resolution? Test with emulator configurations.

8. Memory usage in Android

In order to provide mobile users with the ability to multitask, Android sets limits to how much RAM is available to an application. These limits are not static and change as mobile usage increases or decreases.

Considering RAM limitations throughout app development, and apps that are running in the background can hog unnecessary resources.

But you can optimize your app by:

• Limiting the lifespan of services, consider using intent service to limit the lifespan
• Release UI resources when users move to a different UI
• Utilize memory-efficient code constructs
• Minimize the use of external libraries

how fast does your app launches?

Do you know that for average top 25 apps on Play Store, the launch time goes anywhere from 800ms to 4.5s?  Now, 4.5s is way too much for most use cases.

The bottom line, apps need to start quickly!

To optimize your iOS app’s launch time, you should consider the following:

• Embed fewer dylibs.
• Consolidate Objective-C classes.
• Eliminate static initializers.
• Use Swifter, Apple recommends.
• Discourage the usage of dlopen().

On Android, the following usually impacts the app launch time:

• Instantiation of many views.
• Expensive content like decoding bitmaps.
• Running layouts.

To make your app launch faster on Android:

• Don’t inflate parts of UI that you don’t require on the first launch. Use a placeholder for. hierarchies that can be optionally inflated later.
• Avoid memory churns due to allocation and garbage collections whenever possible.
• Use tools to monitor and optimize your app launch time.
• Avoid initialization code in your app’s object.
• Remember, an app that has been launched recently, and an app that is launching for the first time will behave differently.

9. Consider low-end Android Mobiles

Not all Android users have the latest 2+GBs of RAM. When we look at the device available for Android, we see high division in terms of device capabilities.

When most developers develop and optimize their app for performance, they make this one big mistake. They optimize the app for the wrong device, often for the high-end devices available for them.

A good rule of thumb is that you should always have a variety of devices to optimize your app’s performance. That way you will be able to test across:

• Various Speeds
• Form factors and resolutions
• Small RAM sizes

10. Restoring user data on new devices

App users often spend a lot of time setting up the application and make it work as they intend to on their phones. When they re-install an app, then most users expect their old settings to re-surface.

Preserving settings data can help enhance the quality of your application by:

• Any setting modified by the user
• Push notification settings
• Whether the user has seen the welcome screens and introductory onboarding screens

11. Find latency killers

Why is latency harmful to your app? It is very important to remove latency issues from your application. Latency is known to cause app errors and often crashes the entire application. Statistics have told us that if an app runs slowly, more than 50% of users will uninstall your app within 24 hours. Try to remove all latency related errors.

To effectively deal with latency related issues:

You can restrict third-party latency sources when your network quality is poor

Reduce the need for latency killer APIs that you might be using on your mobile.

12. Multitasking iOS apps: –

Remember that time when your app kept crashing?

Well, let’s have a look at a scenario where you have one single app that’s running on the device.

Now, let’s introduce another app into this scenario, we are still doing good and have some tiny memory left.

Now, when we introduce another app into the picture, the system doesn’t have any other memory to allocate. It now will kill a process to free up resources.

This is what makes application development so challenging (for those who actually care about it!).

Fixing these challenges requires a little understanding of the iOS ecosystem. Let’s see how you can optimize your app for multitasking:

• You can use instruments to identify and fix bugs
• Prioritize your work appropriately and don’t block the main thread
• Identify and manage your working set
• Use caches and respond to memory warnings
• Leveraging the virtual memory system to increase reclaimable memory

If someone can even follow 50% of these, they will observe a tremendous amount of difference in how their app will perform.

Conclusion: –

Follow these steps to design an error-free mobile application. These tips will help you a lot. When it comes to mobile applications, few have the rare attention to detail like Syspoly. It frequently shares its thoughts about building mobile applications. You can contact me for more information and queries related to it.