High-level hints on React Native performance improvements

React Native performance is of the utmost importance. A high-performance app can greatly satisfy your customers and can take your business to the next level, while a slow app can kill your business. Nobody wants to waste their time on a slow app.

It’s rather obvious that a slow app annoys its users. In the age of Internet, we want everything instantly. When we get things instantly, we can save our precious time to use on more important tasks.

Your app users will get frustrated if it takes too long to load an app page. What the users want is smooth performance , so if you can develop a super fast app that is extremely useful and helpful, you can achieve massive success in your business.

React Native is one of the most popular frameworks for mobile app development. Just like Flutter,Xamarin, and Ionic, React Native is also very popular. It’s a hot mobile app development technology on the web, loved by a great number ofdevelopers and trusted by great companies .

It’s the favorite choice of many individual developers and companies because it’s easy to make apps with React Native.

Successful and popular apps such as Facebook, Skype, Tesla, Walmart, Instagram, Facebook Ads Manager, Facebook Analytics, Chop, and Discord have been built using this amazing framework.

Using React Native has many benefits. One of them is that it provides an amazing performance.

This article talks about React Native performance. In this post, I’ll try to tell you exactly what kind of app speed you will get through React Native. I’ll also talk about the performance issues of this framework and will explain how to solve those problems.

Near-native performance

One of the most interesting benefits of React Native is that it provides near-native performance.

The main benefit that any mobile app development framework gives is fast app development. They let you complete a project incredibly fast. In other words, these frameworks increase a developer’s productivity by speeding up the development process. Such frameworks have come to speed up your work at the cost of app performance.

React Native is also a framework. It’s not a language. So, obviously, React Native performance is also not as good as the performance provided by native languages such as Java, Swift, and Objective-C.

Although React Native performance is not exactly as same as native performance, you have to understand that it gives a near-native performance , which means apps built with this framework will be super fast.

But the official site and other people may claim that React Native provides native performance. That’s not true. You can’t achieve native performance through a framework.

In order to build native apps that give native performance, you must use native app development. In other words, you must use native languages such as Java, Swift, or Objective-C.

Java is used for Android development while Swift and Objective-C are used for iOS development.

Performance optimization with native code

React Native allows you to optimize your app’s performance by mixing native code in your app. Use of native code will make your app faster.

You can include native code in some areas of your app and the rest of the app can be built using React Native. That’s how the Facebook app was built.

In order to use native code, you must have the native language skills or you need developers who have some native app development experience. Use of native code greatly boosts React Native performance. Not all frameworks give this kind of development flexibility.

React Native performance issues and their solutions

Now let’s talk about React Native performance issues and how to fix them.

• Navigation issues: Although React Native performance is good, this framework has some navigation issues. The React Native team has been working on fixing the issues for a very long time. They have solved many problems related to navigation but there are still issues that need to be fixed.Just like the overall performance of an app, navigational performance is also equally important. Because if the navigational performance of an app is not smooth, it will be hard for the user to access various features of the app.If navigating from one screen to other screens is not easy, the app users will not like it that much.A smooth performing navigation gives the user a nice user experience. It actually makes the app more user-friendly. Overall, it makes the app worlds better.React Native provides you with different ways to build a navigation. It gives you 4 components

  , such as Navigator iOS, Navigation Experiment, Navigator, and React Navigation.

  Navigator iOS can be used only for iOS. So this won’t help in Android navigation development. The Navigator component can be used only for small app and prototype development, so it’s not appropriate for complex or high-performance app development.

  The Navigation Experiment component has been used in several apps but not everyone likes it for obvious reasons. For example, Airbnb found it difficult to use.

  The React Navigation component is a good one, used by a large number of apps. You can try this one.

  You can also try React Native Navigation . It’s a great navigation tool developed by Wix.

  

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• Launch time: Slow app launch is another issue of React Native apps. If your app opens too slowly, you probably have too many dependencies in your app and maybe you’re using slow components.You have to use fast, high-performance components and have to try to decrease the number of dependencies in your app. The Object.Finalize element can increase the app launch time. Use of too many finalizers can result in out-of-memory errors.
• Memory leakage: Memory leakage, a React Native performance issue, may occur due to unnecessary processes that run in the background in an Android app. Use of scrolling lists like SectionList, FlatList, or VirtualList can solve this problem. Instead of using ListView, use these scrolling lists.
• Large app size: The size of React Native apps are usually larger than native apps. The app size will increase greatly if you use too many third-party libraries and native components.To decrease the app size, you may try using fewer third-party libraries and components. You should also compress the images and optimize other resources to reduce the app size.

There are many other React Native performance issues, but there are effective ways to solve them. We have to understand that React Native is not the only framework that has issues, all frameworks and languages have limitations and issues.

Although React Native has some disadvantages, there are many, many exciting benefits of using this framework, which definitely outweigh its limitations, disadvantages, and issues.

This article talked about React Native performance. We hope you have found this post useful!