Is your mobile application struggling with frequent slowdowns during testing? Are you tired of the constant buffering and crashing your app faces whenever you test it?

Every developer has come face-to-face with poor app performance in one way or another.

From slow loading times to frequent crashes, these moments of friction can lead to a poor user experience, which can resign your app to a fate of inevitable obscurity in the competitive app marketplace.

In many cases, these problems stem from poor or inefficient technical design. It could also be because of outdated software.

If your application is currently experiencing this unfortunate fate across both iOS and Android platforms, then you’ll need to work on fixing it to re-establish your brand in the hypercompetitive mobile development space.

There are many ways you can optimise app performance that don’t have to involve scrapping your app and starting from scratch. Let’s take a look at some ways you can optimise your mobile application’s performance.

What Causes Poor App Performance?

Before attempting to fix your app’s performance, it’s important to know the plausible causes of its slow and inefficient performance. Diagnosing and identifying problems beforehand can give you an accurate plan of action to combat your app’s laggy runtime and constant crashing.

These five potential causes may be to blame when it comes to slow app performance on mobile devices.

1. Inefficient Code

The bane of many app developers is bad code getting in the way of creating an app with optimal performance. Poorly written code can cause your app to lag and crash. This could arise due to a number of reasons, from memory leaks clogging up memory to executing resource-heavy tasks on main threads.

Overloading your app with complicated functions and modules can make the app slower and more likely to freeze. It also increases the burden of the developer as they’ll have to navigate more functions and code to address, resolve, and debug the issue.

The best fix for this is to clean up your code’s logic. Trim existing code to speed up the execution process.

Moreover, avoid solely relying on low-code and no-code platforms for optimisation, as these platforms often include dependencies and bloat to the workflow that reduce efficiency. These platforms aren’t built for efficiency, so cleaning the code is a must for every developer to ensure their app is working smoothly.

2. Poorly Structured Network Calls

Another contributor to poor app performance is the inability to handle a high volume of network requests efficiently, leading to increased latency and reduced responsiveness.

An optimised app can typically handle real-time server communication requests quickly. This translates to fast loading times and a better user experience.

However, under certain conditions, the network requests can be too much for your application to bear, increasing its bandwidth and slowing app response time to a crawl.

There are many reasons why network calls may be slow and below standard.

One such reason is a lack of caching options in your app. Caching locally stored data reduces the need for repeated server requests, minimising resource demand and improving response times. Without caching, apps rely heavily on slower server interactions, causing delays.

Other reasons include unoptimised APIs, which can drain device resources; and uncompressed data, which can drain resources quickly and slow response times on the phone.

3. Large App Size

Some apps run on complex networks and engines that require a large storage space allocation. This, naturally, can deter users who have limited space in their phones—which is common with many Android and Apple users.

A large app size can signal underlying fluff in the app, particularly if it’s not using a lot of assets or functions to operate. These assets may include high-res media, redundant libraries, and unused codes.

A heavy app contributes to slower performance, longer updates, and a worse customer experience in general. It incentivises customers to look for alternatives in the app store that are less bulky. If your app faces a similar problem, you may have to proactively trim your assets and code to make it run better.

4. Lack of Device-Specific Optimization

Another potential app performance issue arises from neglecting device-specific considerations during development.

You can’t use the same code to work optimally on both Android and Apple devices instantly. These two systems operate on different architectures, and ignoring these nuances can increase the risk of creating system inefficiencies.

For instance, Android devices have a completely different set of processors, RAM capacities, and screen sizes than Apple devices. Failing to adapt iOS-specific code for Android's architecture can lead to compatibility issues, resulting in glitches and crashes.

Similarly, neglecting iOS-specific features like Metal for graphic rendering can result in an unoptimised graphical output.

As such, it’s essential to familiarise yourself with native development tools for each platform, namely Xcode for iOS and Android Studio for Android. It’s also important to test your app across a wide range of devices under the brand. This way, you can ensure smoother performance with fewer chances of encountering technical issues.

How to Optimize Mobile App Performance on iOS & Android

1. Clean Your Code

To optimise your mobile app performance, it’s essential to evaluate and fix your mobile app’s current code. This is a comprehensive and time-consuming process that involves eliminating, editing, cleaning, and replacing code to speed up performance and remove inefficiencies.

There are many strategies you can consider to maintain your current code’s functionality while improving the architecture.

For instance, a common task developers do to patch a severely slow app is to refactor the app’s architecture using either MVC or MVMM processes to improve performance. You can also refactor large functions into smaller and more readable ones.

Cleaning your app’s memory leaks and minimising resource-intensive tasks in the main thread can also help make app management and future developments easier to accomplish.

In any case, doing the manual work and cleaning up code regularly (say, 3-6 months) is a good way to ensure that your app remains usable for its users. This is especially true if you’re planning a major update or development sprint in the upcoming cycle.

2. Get Help From Experts

If you’re struggling to achieve the desired results for your app, you can consider collaborating with other app developers, software engineers, and tech talent who specialise in app development. These developers bring a new layer of expertise to the table, helping provide a new set of eyes to refine your code and improve app performance on both Android and Apple devices.

You can improve the output of your app development with PixelForce and other app development companies thanks to their knowledge of various aspects of the field. These companies have experts on hand for a variety of related fields, like frontend and backend development, UI/UX design, and quality assurance testing.

By hiring specialists, whether it’s on a contractual basis or a one-off consultancy agreement, you can save time and allocate resources more effectively to improve the performance of your app on both iOS and Android devices.

3. Leverage Platform-Specific Features

Another way to optimise your mobile app performance is by using the plethora of features and tools offered by iOS and Android-specific platforms.

As previously mentioned, iOS and Android devices have different architectures.

Apple uses Swift, which helps write fast and efficient code. It also has Metal, which focuses on more graphic-intensive rendering tasks. Core Animation is another platform within the Apple ecosystem that creates smooth transitions.

On the other hand, Android offers platforms like ART (Android Runtime) for better app execution. It also has Jetpack libraries for more modular needs, and Material Design to help create intuitive user interfaces.

These tools, when harnessed to the best of their abilities, can be effective in fine-tuning your app and making it more responsive, no matter what phone you use. In turn, this can help create better experiences for users in each ecosystem.

4. Use a CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) is a helpful solution to promote better performance and app response time.

These units work by storing various static assets like images, videos and stylesheets in servers across the world. If a user accesses your app, this network delivers content from the nearest location—eliminating delays and latency issues and enhancing the user experience.

To implement a CDN, research and select one of many CDN providers like Cloudflare or Akamai. Then integrate it with your app using its respective API or plugin. Once it’s integrated, upload your assets into the CDN and replace your locally-hosted URLs with CDN ones.

From there, you can monitor your performance and adjust settings as needed. Implementing this technique can help keep your app working quickly and with little delay in both of the top smartphone brands.