Solving over 35 Performance issues in React Native

Many developers who have tried Cordova and other platforms to build hybrid applications didn’t believed in the idea, until they worked with React Native.

While it would be too early to call React Native the silver bullet of mobile app development, but quick iterations, easy code sharing, and fast shipping are the perks that developers love.

The only concern about React Native is that people often complain about performance issues.

So, we did an engineering analysis of 20+ applications built with React Native and handpicked some common performance issues that you must know:

Heavy CPU usage on Javascript Side

React Native runs on multiple threads, which are interconnected and synced with each other.

Heavy CPU usage can break your application, learn about the minimise the operations running on the Javascript realm.

Memory leakage

Pretty common issues for Android applications with a lot of unnecessary background process running in the background. Read how decompiled the issue and proposed a solution.

Application size

80% of the React Native application suffers from large APK size. Hybrid applications rely heavily on libraries, and APIs that may or may not be stable.

Learn about to optimise these resources.

Issues in Navigation components

Almost 9 out of 10 developers complain about performance issues when they implement navigation components. Learn more about the issue and the alternatives of React-navigation.

Slow app launch time

There are number of factors which impacts the app launch time, and it’s a continuous cycle to minimising the dependencies and improving the overall performance.

Infinite scrolling in React Native

Literally, there are tons of iterations involved in tuning the smoothness of scrolling in React Native. The expectations of true Native scrolling never met.

Wondering what causes the issues, and how to improve the scrolling, keep reading.

And so many other issues that has to be solved before you ship your application. Like:

• Animating the image size for different UI view
• Lack of multithreading support
• App lags while changing the orientation of devices
• Image caching and optimisation
• Issues with image placeholders
• Issues while using third party libraries
• Map optimisation issues
• API JSON data optimisation
• Frozen UI
• Working with animations
• Slow app response for keyword popups

I decompiled the root causes of these issues(35+) and put together insights on solving it. You can read the extensive guide here.

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Feel free to share your thoughts and reach me if you have any questions.