While performance is a topic that can change the overall perception of the service you deliver, it is also essential to consider other factors, such as the user experience. Improving the user experience will result in increased satisfaction and loyalty, which will help you retain customers. Additionally, performance can also have a direct impact on business goals.
Since we know apps are integral to any business plan to reach a more extensive audience base, React native app development aces the race here.
On the other hand, performance is of utmost importance when building mobile applications, as the framework dramatically impacts the overall user experience. Poor performance can lead to frustrating experiences for the user, leading to lower conversion rates. It is, therefore, important to carefully choose the React Native framework that will best suit the needs of your project. Several options are available but choosing the right one for your app is crucial.
To help you gain insights about React Native app performance, we have compiled a few do’s and don’ts to improve its performance exponentially.
What are you waiting for?
Let’s begin this post and unleash the infinite possibilities with RN.
Why do businesses prefer building React Native app?
- React Native is a fast and less time-consuming alternative to developing separate mobile apps for Android and iOS devices. This means that the same codebase can be used for both platforms, with a few changes needing to be done independently. React Native is swift and can be used to build Android and iOS applications with a single codebase. Consequently, it has become one of the most popular JavaScript libraries for building user interfaces.
- By using React Native, developers can get a native-looking and -feeling Android and iOS app even though the codebase is based on a single platform. React Native makes cross-platform development possible by providing an interface between the native and JavaScript code.
- React Native is a popular mobile development platform that has gained much traction in the last few years. It is optimized well for different mobile devices, taking advantage of the GPU instead of the CPU. This results in good performance and speed.
- React Native is a community-driven framework that allows you to create user interfaces that look and feel native. This makes it an excellent option for mobile apps. Several libraries and components are available so that you can develop complex apps quickly.
- React Native provides an almost complete development experience, making it a preferred choice for mobile apps. It has fast performance, can be built using popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript frameworks, and has a large community of developers.
Do’s to enhance React Native App’s performance
Image caching solution
When using the Image component in React Native, be aware that sometimes caching images can cause issues. Although the component handles image requests like web browsers, forcing a fresh request is occasionally necessary.
Image caching issues can be quickly resolved using a third-party library called react-native-fast-image; it is available for iOS and Android and is efficient at caching images. Using this library, you can avoid the issues that can occur when images are loaded from the network. This library can dramatically speed up the loading of images in your app.
Using appropriate image size
Images are an important part of any React Native app – they provide a sense of realism and immersion and can significantly impact the app’s performance. As with all aspects of developing a React Native app, by optimizing the images, the app can run more smoothly and save on battery life.
A well-optimized React Native application will not consume a lot of memory, even if there are a lot of images rendered. Images not appropriately optimized may lead to the react native application crashing.
Integration of appropriate navigation strategies
To keep React Native easily accessible to new users, the React Native team has been working to address problems related to navigation and has fixed a ton of them. Still, a ton is left to be fixed to provide a seamless experience.
Avoid unnecessary renders
React Native is based on the React library and handles rendering components just like React.js., making it a good choice for building user interfaces. It’s relatively new but proliferating and has a lot of potential.
Use nativeDriver with ‘Animated’ library
Animations are a great way to add life to your React Native app. There are many different animation libraries available, and you can use any of them to create engaging user experiences.
One of the most popular libraries for react native development services is the Animated library. It provides a lot of flexibility and options for animating and is easy to use.
React native uses nativeDriver to send animations over the native bridge before animation starts, helping the animations to execute independently of a blocked JavaScript thread, thus resulting in a smoother experience without dropping many frames. This is done using a separate thread for the animation and animating over the network rather than blocking the main thread.
Flipper to debug issues
Flipper is a powerful new tool for debugging React Native apps. With Flipper, it’s easy to inspect what’s going on under the hood of your Flutter app and diagnose problems as you run your app. It also provides a convenient way to share any Flutter code with team members and reviewers, iterates the codebase faster, and enables continuous code interaction. At the same time, you develop, test, and deploy.
It integrates directly with the native code, and its integration with a React Native app is enabled out of the box. This makes it a valuable tool for developers. It has various features that make it an efficient app development tool.
Hermes utilization
Hermes is an open-source JavaScript engine precisely optimized for mobile applications. It features 3 big wins: First, a new (and fast!) JIT compiler, which results in up to 3x the performance of V8. Next is a truly concurrent runtime, meaning there is no waiting for JavaScript to be parsed and optimized.
Don’ts to enhance React Native App’s performance
Never leave console statements in the source code
The console.log statement is one of the most common methods to debug in JavaScript applications in general and React Native apps. When debugging React Native apps, knowing how to use the console.log statement can be helpful.
Undeniably, React Native and JavaScript can be a powerful combination, but they both come with their own set of challenges. When building a React Native app, making sure the code is thread-safe is crucial. Leaving the console statements in the source code can run into some significant bottlenecks.
Console statements can be a pain to remove, but there is a way to make it easier. A third-party package called babel-plugin-transform-remove-console can help.
Stop Scrollview to render a list of data
There is a list of ways to create scrollable lists in React Native- ScrollView and FlatList components. Although they are both great solutions, there is one slight difference between the two that you should be aware of. ScrollView renders its content as a continuous scroll, while FlatList renders its content as a list of images. If you need to have a list that scrolls but also contains images, then you should use FlatList.
Removing unnecessary libraries
Libraries and features you add to your React or React Native application should be those you need and exclude any that you don’t. By doing this, you will only be adding libraries and features that you need, reducing the potential burden on your codebase.
Avoid anonymous functions while rendering
To have a performant React Native application, you should create functions in render() instead of using react(). Functions allow the React Native application to run as though it were a regular Java application, resulting in a performance boost.
Time for a final call
React Native lets you build native cross-platform apps more efficiently than other platforms. It runs on iOS, Android, and other mobile platforms, which means it works on any device. It is entirely agnostic to the native platform and can execute on any one of them, depending on which technology makes the most sense for your app.
When you hire dedicated react native developer, you can build a high-performance app as long as you build with performance in mind from the start.
With this hope that above mentioned do’s and don’ts are proven helpful to you, we will sign off. Until next time stay tuned for more exciting updates and news in React Native world.