React Native: Key Issues and Tips to Enhance App Performance

React Native has carved quite a niche for itself in the development market, thanks to its ability to enable quick, agile, and seamless development processes. And, within a short period, it has surpassed the likes of other platforms like Xamarin and Ionic. Even though it is a relatively new entrant among other cross-platform development frameworks, it often has performance issues. Therefore, more the tabs, navigation, controls, animations & third-party libraries – slower the React Native becomes.

Goes without saying each change that you make gets implemented from one React Native build to another. And, some of the notorious and common issues with their solutions are listed below to help ease the development process for you. 1. Slow app launch time: One of the biggest reasons for user churn when it comes to apps is a slow app launch time which is typically caused by the default implementations of React Native. A good way to address this problem is by managing the Object.finalize element. You see, since finalizers run on a single thread, all other objects are forced to wait until all finalizers have been executed before the garbage can be collected. This, in turn, causes huge dependencies resulting in slow app launch times. 2. Memory leak: A React Native app can suffer from memory leakage due to a handful of reasons; for example, scrolling way down a list of songs can cause the app to start blocking the smartphone’s RAM, resulting in reduced app performance. A terrific solution to this particular issue is to make use of FlatList or VirtualizedList instead of using ListView. 3. Frame dropping: Whenever there is heavy computation involved, there is a good chance that the frame will be dropped. Here is a quick example to help you understand: say you are rendering a new scene with various child components, the likelihood of a drop in the frames goes up significantly. But worry not, for this problem too can be addressed rather easily; experts recommend using an Animated library with Native driver to enhance the serialization/ deserialization time. Not only will this address the frame dropping issue but will also improve the performance while most of the interpolation work is being done in the native thread. 4. Slow navigation: Navigation transitions slow down when React attempts to render a new screen while the animation is running on the Javascript thread. Unfortunately, this results in the JavaScript thread being jammed up and the animations struggling. To address this particular issue, it is advisable to make use of an interaction manager which helps deliver a significant boost to the app’s performance when it suffers from slow navigator transitions. But be warned that in case the user experience is taking more hits than expected, it would be a better idea to make use of Layout Animation instead.

React Native remains the leading tool for the development of apps for a reason. Sure enough, nothing is perfect including React Native. As the above discussion suggests, there are some issues that even a tool as capable as React Native can throw up. With that being said, there are plenty of simple and easy ways to deal with the problems one may face while developing apps with React Native. A majority of the issues one may come across during this process can be swiftly addressed with a little bit of tinkering and quick thinking. While this guide is meant to assist you in your React Native development endeavors, if you still find yourself needing help with your project, it would be a good idea to engage the services of a trusted React Native mobile app development company.

Olivia Johnson is a technical writer, love to share stuffs related to technology & development.