5 Ways to Increase/Boost Your Mobile Application Performance

Application performance is the measurement of the real-world performance & availability of applications. It is a good indicator of the level of service that a provider is offering and is one of the top monitored IT metrics.

In this Blog, you gonna learn how to optimize the App Speed, App Size, battery usage and so on. 

1. Use R8 before publishing the App

2. Find your Apps Bottlenecks 

3. Cache Whenever Possible

4. Get rid of Memory Leaks

5. Optimize Networking

Use R8 before publishing the App:

R8 is the tool to optimize your code before a release build and its basically does three major things to make your Apk Smaller also it has a side effect that it makes it harder to reverse engineering but we are talking about making it smaller. 

It renames all your classes, functions and all your fields to short unreadable names so which of course makes your file smaller because the names are shorter and in your release build you don't need to read your code so that's totally fine if someone comes over and reverse engineers your app they will get only unreadable names so that's one of the side effects. It also comes with the big benefit that it just removes unused classes and unused functions.

Now, why do we need to remove unused classes and unused functions?

If we use big libraries that add 10 Mb of Size to your APK but only use two functions of the library then what R8 will do before releasing so for your release build basically it will throw all the parts of that 10 MB library that your App doesn't need and will only keep these classes with the 2 functions that you actually using in your app which will drastically decrease your App Size. It actually just removes unused resources like unused Strings, Images and so on.

How to Enable R8 in your App?

To enable R8, open build.gradle module app file and add this piece of code inside the buildTypes.

buildTypes{

  release{
    minifyEnabled true
    shrinkResources true
    proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFiles(
      'proguard-android-optimize.txt'
    ),'proguard-rules.pro'
  }
}

Find your Apps Bottlenecks 

The best way to find your Bottlenecks is to use the Android Studio Profiler it will give you exactly the insights that I talked about here in regard to performance like CPU Utilization, Network Environments and Server Performance it will give you insights on all of that while are using the App so you can test out certain features of your app. 

For Example: 

If you have a video call app you just stay in a video call and then you see okay that's how much ram my App actually consumes in that call maybe you have an additional chat or so you can open this and you see ok here's actually spike in my battery consumption in my network consumption. 

So maybe we need to optimize a little bit the Android Studio Profiler just gives you a very good understanding of when your App is actually using a lot of resources.

Cache Whenever Possible

Whenever you can cache data whenever there is data you want to reuse that you actually get from the network but that you can reuse on later launches of your app and cache that data you don't want to re-fetch so you of course only want to fetch the data when it needs to be up-to-date every time the user uses the app but very often we are totally fine just storing data that we fetched once in a room database or maybe files in your app's local cache directory and of course, you want to make sure that you should use proper images caching libraries like Coil, Glides, Picasso and all these typical libraries that we have for android that are out there always use one of these to make sure that your app actually has the fastest access to data possible. 

Get rid of Memory Leaks

Optimize your App's memory consumption that is before you release your app always make sure that your app doesn't have any major memory leaks a memory leak happens when the garbage collector basically doesn't collect an object of your code that is not needed anymore so that's often cause in combination with android components such as activities or so that have a life cycle in combination.

When it comes to memory, it usually refers to physical memory. When the same application runs on different machines or operating systems, the size of the allocated physical memory varies depending on the operating system and hardware conditions. 

Generally, the virtual memory used by an application is roughly the same. The memory discussed in this article is virtual memory. All objects operated in the code can be measured by virtual memory without focusing on if the object exists in physical memory or not. It is considered ideal when the objects consume less memory.

Optimize Networking

The common mistake we all make is using State Flutter widgets for Flutter App development at the beginning of development. Stateful widgets can be used if your application has a large build function and you want to rebuild. 

SetState() and StatefulWidget should only be used to rebuild or update. Moreover, it is better to avoid using it in whole widgets for better Flutter performance.