Creating web and mobile applications that perform seamlessly can be challenging. When performance is not up to par, you can lose customers and destroy your brand. This is very true, even with React Native app development. Successful app development requires a commitment to making sure your application is fast and easy for users to use, otherwise they’ll abandon it once the novelty wears off.
What is React Native Performance?
When we talk about React Native performance we are not talking about the performance of JavaScript/JavaScript engines. We are talking about everything that makes up the actual user experience which is related to the application development for mobile and web applications.
React Native Performance application performance is one of the most important things for us to have in our app development and if you are still designing and developing with the best React Native programmers like Prometteur Solutions then it means that you will be able to compete with other native mobile application products in terms of user experience. In other words, your mobile app and web applications will not be struggling with performance issues.
How to Fix React Native Performance Issues
It has to be said that React Native comes with lots of pitfalls, especially when the Reactive Native app is not created by expert programmers. This section contains common performance pitfalls to avoid in your React Native app development and more useful tips to improve your React applications and React Native performance and responsiveness.
React Native can have performance Issues this is why observing the need in order to keep your app always responding smoothly is very important. The important part is not getting too worked up and instead taking the time to optimize your React Native app development performance. There are a lot of steps you can take to fix the React Native performance issues and keep your app or application responding fast and smoothly. Let us look at some of these steps.
Navigation Issues
Before you start working on navigation issues on your React Native apps, you may want to test your app on multiple devices and platforms to see how it works on those platforms. This will help you to identify the root cause of the performance issues. After identifying the issues, you can use some common sense optimizations and get a fast, smooth, and good user experience.
You can observe these to solve navigation issues
- Preventing Navigation animation pauses when switching from nested locations
Always keep your animations smooth and fast. Try to avoid unnecessary animation in transitions. If you notice any animation lag, just disable them.
- Fixing Scrolling performance and more
The top trending topic in the React Native performance community is to fix the scrolling performance of your React Native app. This issue has been very challenging for the React Native team to resolve. The solution is not only to optimize the HTML but to optimize the CSS as well, but the top priority is to optimize the HTML. You can optimize your React Native performance by following the steps mentioned in React Native Performance Woes.
Optimizing the Initial Scrolling
There are different things that affect the initial scrolling performance in your React Native app. To optimize the initial scrolling performance, you need to make some changes in your HTML code, You can also,
- Optimize the styles of individual components (those that are enabled by default)
- Optimize the individual elements that scroll by binding them to the parent component
- Optimize the initial scroll event
- Optimize the default unselect button styling
- Optimize the keyboard focus handling
- Layout performance
Best Ways to handle Animations
Animation is one of the best components in your React Native app development. But, still, there are some common issues that users may encounter. The most commonly encountered problems are related to excessive CPU usage, memory consumption, and lag.
Let’s discuss the issues that your React Native applications face and how you can improve the performance of your React Native apps.
Memory Usage
At this moment, your React Native project is running your application in production mode. You should have enough storage and memory available to run your app on both desktop and mobile devices. In case of a memory leak, the user is feeling the lag. Your application is sending messages to the server and you don’t get back the response from the server. Users feel the application is slow and isn’t performing as expected.
Optimize Your JS thread
DOM operations for long table sizes or interactions with other systems can be problems for your React Native development and React Native performance. Take a good look at your JS thread and make some optimization.
When you’re trying to perform something that requires a lot of processing, a frame will generally be dropped. When you render a new scene with numerous child components, for example, the odds of a frame drop are higher. Also, the efficiency will be limited because every frame needs to be drawn in the scene, so there will be a lot of waste.
Avoid loading images or transitions when your app can be maintained without them. Imagine loading background images and breaking your UI down for each frame or transition; that will lead to poor app performance. But even the best computer uses RAM. So, it’s important to keep the UI even in memory, because the resources will not be available.
How do we achieve this? Use React Native Sprites
It doesn’t solve the problem completely but we can actually avoid loading those images or transition animations while rendering them in our application, because you have a way to store them in the hardware device memory.
You should also improve Single-page Architecture.
It’s much easier to save the entire app UI and view logic when your React Native application has a single-page architecture (more on it here). In a single page application, every step of the UI is on the screen, there’s a single React Native thread of execution, and React Native’s one-way data flow in JavaScript must be used for data processing.
Use cleaned console.log statements
While console.log() statements are necessary for debugging your react native app, a large quantity of them might create performance issues. Because some bits of code are synchronous, they may cause your app to slow down. However, using the babel plugin, you may get rid of all console calls.
Also, always use cleaned console.log statements to reduce the amount of time it takes for an app to be launched. Some tools like snort ( http://snort-thejark.de ) can alert you with issues and you can then analyze and fix them. Also, avoid having long React Native JavaScript files. You should be able to launch your app within a couple of seconds and users will get the same experience across devices, and the same experience on the server.
Infinite Scrolling
One of the common performance issues that React Native developers must pay attention to is infinite scrolling. Infinite scrolling means that a user can scroll down or up to an infinite depth. That can be a big problem, especially when the display of a user interface is scaled up to get better visual and general performance. That would be far too large on the screen, consuming all available RAM, causing a bottleneck of React Native performance. To solve that issue, developers should either choose to improve their app’s UI layout, by adding more layouts or by decreasing their display size, instead of making their app’s UI scroll infinitely.
One of the most significant performance bottlenecks for newsfeed apps in React native’s default approach of infinite scrolling. There are three approaches to achieve endless scrolling in React Native:
ScrollView
We all know ScrollView which has become common in React Native apps. It can display 100 items (like the GIF) for our layout. However, it can be very painful for your scrolling experience.
To have a smooth user experience, you can easily remove this scroll view and significantly improve our scrolling experience and reduce the memory footprint.
How can we do it? We can simply use a different for loop instead of the scrollView loop.
ListView for extending React Native UI Kit
React Native is one of the most powerful tools in front-end development but most of the developers struggle with performance issues and low resources on React Native apps.
React Native UIKit orchestrator reusable component is an intermediate JavaScript class used by React Native performance to set up initial views on devices, configure App Store discovery components, set up UIAppearance, handle updates, and more. This is an excellent option for solving ListView issues.
FlatList
FlatList is an official UI component created by Facebook that looks pretty awesome. Moreover, it’s the first UI component that implements the React Navigation library, which allows you to provide a URL by putting navigation properties in components. Implementing FlatList enhances performance in terms of views
Progressive Image Loading
As a further step, you may utilize your progressive image logic to load the thumbnail first, and then fade it for a few seconds when the actual picture is ready to display.
We have analyzed the issue and can see that the progress image takes significant time to be loaded in the device UI. In order to avoid this issue, you need to make sure the image size is limited in your UI. Don’t use Progress Image if the source is not dynamic. If you do,
1. It will slow down your user experience, and
2. If you use the progress image, it will be limited only to the screen size (or screen).
But it doesn’t mean you have to use link-to-progress in your React Native performance, in fact, this won’t work. So, use a small thumbnail — This may be accomplished by providing the markup of this tiny thumbnail as an <img/> tag in the initial HTML, allowing the browser to quickly acquire it.
React Native and Multi-Threading Issues
Probably, the easiest performance issue to track down is a multi-threading issue. The reason is that you have two threads that create, cache, and query data. The second thread, when it’s submitted, will block the original thread.
However, it’s very common in all third-party libraries because they create a network call to another thread and that’s when the real performance issue is created.
If you want to avoid this issue, either use an explicit query or use one of the queues. In both cases, it avoids a network call and cache invalidation of the data, so you can find the issue.
In addition, you have to use a thread pool and schedule your requests to be done on the queue. This is very important because when there’s thread deallocation, you can schedule another request in the queue to be fulfilled.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you have learned a lot of React Native performance topics which will be very helpful for your React Native projects. We hope this article helped you in creating React Native applications with better performance and a good user experience.
