7 Proven Ways To Skyrocket Your Mobile App Performance And User Experience

Today, mobile apps are the primary interface between businesses and consumers. But, Did you know that 53% of users will abandon an app if it takes more than 3 seconds to load? This indicates that mobile applications must be optimised for the best performance.

In this article, let me take you through various stages of mobile app performance optimization that will elevate your app from the rest of the crowd.

Understanding The Importance Of App Performance And User Experience Enhancements

Various factors like loading speed, responsiveness, and overall user experience impact a mobile app’s performance. A high-performing app not only retains users but also enhances brand loyalty. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are vital metrics that developers must monitor to ensure optimal app performance. These include:

Loading time – Track how long it takes for your app to load and identify areas for improvement.
Crash Rates – Monitor crash reports to identify and fix issues that could affect user experience
User Retention rates – Analyze how users interact with your app to understand where they may be experiencing difficulties.

According to a study by Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile website if they have trouble accessing it. This is where User experience enhancement becomes a unique aspect altogether that impacts an app’s performance.

A seamless experience leads to higher user satisfaction and increased retention rates. And so, when we say mobile app performance optimization, it’s not just about speed but making your mobile app ready to compete with the best.

Key Techniques for Mobile App Performance Optimization

1. Minimize Loading Time

Reducing app load time is crucial. Users expect apps to launch quickly, and any delay can lead to abandonment. However, most businesses fail to realize that the optimal loading time is from 0 to 2 seconds. If you fail to achieve within this timeframe, you’ll be losing viewers every second.

Here are user experience enhancements to minimize load time:

Prioritize Critical Resources: Load essential elements first and defer non-critical content. But what is considered essential? The navigation bar, header, footer, and logo are important to give the webpage a structure. Then comes the content and media files.

This isn’t a fixed rule but is a best practice to load these elements as a priority item. For example, if your app has a dashboard, load the most important widgets first while deferring less critical data.

Use Splash Screens: Have you used Hotstar or YouTube? Right when you open the app, you get the first “splash” of an animation along with their logo. This is a visual trick to make the app function whereas the app utilises the time at the backend to load necessary resources.

Source: Reddit

This cool user experience enhancement is what we call splash screens, a screen that flashes for a few milliseconds to engage the user. This creates a perception of “speed” while the app is loading. However, ensure that the splash screen is not displayed for too long, as this can frustrate users.

Optimize Network Requests: API requests are expensive. It takes time to send a request, get a response, process it and display it appropriately to the end user.

That’s why Minimize the number of requests made during the initial load. For instance, if your app fetches data from multiple APIs, consider aggregating requests to reduce latency.

2. Optimize Code and Memory Usage

Anybody can develop a website today. However, the best-performing ones stand out from the rest by using the most advanced optimization techniques.

Think about it. You can write code in multiple different ways to achieve the same output. But which one is the fastest? Which one gets the user faster to the page? Which one retains the user to stay on the mobile app?

That approach is THE right way to code your mobile app. Therefore, code coverage and simplification become a crucial step in mobile app optimization.

Clean Code: The code that’s designed on day one will have loopholes and complicated calls that increase loading time. Optimized code will not keep the visitors hanging.

Analyze the code base, figure out the time complexity, and find ways to optimize them. Refactor code to eliminate unnecessary complexity, improve performance and make maintenance easier.

Memory Management: Use memory efficiently to prevent leaks and crashes. This includes using appropriate data structures and managing object lifecycles effectively.

For example, in Android development, using the WeakReference class can help manage memory more effectively by allowing the garbage collector to reclaim memory from objects that are no longer in use.

3. Enhance Client-Server Interaction

The interaction between the app and server plays a significant role and impacts the mobile app performance optimization process:

Optimize APIs: This is similar to what we saw in optimizing network requests. There’s always room to optimize your APIs.

Ensure that APIs are designed to minimize data transfer and reduce latency. For instance, using pagination can efficiently manage large datasets, allowing users to load data in chunks rather than all at once.

Test Under Various Conditions: Network conditions affect how your website loads and how it affects the user.

The stronger the network signal, the faster the website loads. But at times of weak signals, you need to prioritise how your website loads and appears to the end user.

Assess performance on different network types (e.g., 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi) to ensure a smooth experience for all users. Tools like Charles Proxy can help simulate different network conditions during testing.

4. Utilize Caching Strategies

Caching can significantly enhance performance by reducing the need for repeated data retrieval.

A misconception that people have is that caching’s main advantage is making the mobile app fast. But that’s not all. This also plays a role in offline usage. Having a strategic caching protocol enables your app to function no matter what the signal strength is.

Cache Data Wisely: Store frequently accessed data locally to speed up access times. Strengthen each caching aspect from memory caching to database caching effectively.

For example, caching user profiles can improve load times during subsequent app launches.

Monitor Cache Effectiveness: Old, unused data in cache memory is useless. Not only that, this impacts your caching performance and, in turn, messes with your app’s performance.

Regularly review cached data to ensure it remains relevant and does not consume excessive storage. Implementing cache expiration policies can help manage this effectively.

You can use tools like NSURLCache for iOS, Volley for Android or Redis for cross-platform mobile apps for effective caching.

5. Optimize Images and Assets

Images are key aspects of a mobile app. It can be as simple as an icon or something important like the logo. The size and type of images impact how your mobile app performs.

Image Compression: It’s not easy to store HD images in RAW format on the server. It costs every time the app tries to load that image, delaying the app’s response time. In short, you’ll lose users when images take too much time to load.

Tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to compress images without sacrificing quality. This reduces load times and saves bandwidth.

Responsive Images: It becomes a headache to see images out of proportion on the screen. Nobody wants to pinch, zoom in and out to get a good look at your beautiful carousel of images. Frankly, users don’t have the patience for it.

You can even save space on the app’s screen and space on the disk by choosing the appropriately sized images. Implementing the srcset attribute in HTML can help deliver the right image size for different devices.

6. Leverage Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a technique that defers the loading of non-essential resources until they are needed.

You don’t have to load the entire page right away. Lazy loading helps in such a way that only elements the user is viewing are loading. The more they scroll down, that’s when the next elements are initiated.

Sounds cool right?

This can significantly improve initial load times by only loading images and content that are currently in view. Libraries like Intersection Observer can help implement this feature easily.

7. Use Background Processing

Users don’t want to be stuck on the same screen during a task. The powerful feature of mobile apps is the ability to carry out tasks in the background.

How this works is there is a main thread where the primary tasks are running. This is where the user is engaged through the UI. There can be a separate thread that can take care of auxiliary tasks that the user doesn’t need to be aware of.

This can be simple downloading and uploading files and syncing data for further tasks. Use background threads to handle resource-intensive tasks like data processing or network requests.

For example, in iOS, you can use Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) to manage background tasks efficiently.

Source: Dashwave

With Android, you have a cool option called Jobscheduler. This allows the scheduled execution of APIs in the background even if the user leaves the app.

Real-World Examples

1. Spotify – Won Customers By Optimizing Loading Time

Spotify optimized its app by reducing loading times through efficient caching and minimizing the size of its assets.

The result?

Spotify reported a 30% increase in user engagement. They achieved this by ensuring that frequently accessed playlists and songs were cached locally, allowing quicker access and a smoother user experience.

Airbnb

Airbnb utilized a combination of image optimization, lazy loading, and efficient API design to ensure that their app remains responsive, even under heavy load. As a result, Airbnb has reported improved user retention and engagement metrics.

The above methods and cases you saw will still be incomplete if you don’t monitor regularly. Continuous monitoring is a critical stage in mobile app performance optimization.

Tools like UXCam and Firebase Performance Monitoring provide insights into user behaviour, allowing developers to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. Regular audits can help catch performance issues before they impact us

Conclusion

By implementing these techniques, you can create a seamless user experience that keeps users engaged and loyal.

With the right approach to mobile app performance optimization, your app will exceed your expectations. But this becomes a reality only with a top Canadian app development company like DevignTech on your side.