7 Major Reasons Why Your Android App is Performing Slow – Must Read For Developers!

“Nothing worse than a laggy slow app!“. Laggy apps deliver bad experiences to users. It’s true that most of the end-users can’t wait to get a response from a mobile app. The absolute loading time for a mobile app is about two seconds. Still, according to research by Akamai research, for every extra second that the app consumes, the conversion rate decreases by 7%. To add to the problem, users tend to get irritated if they have to wait longer, never again to return to the same app. Another report shows that 48% of the customers uninstall or discontinue using an app if it is slow. 

So, the first important task on hand is to locate the exact cause or reason why the app is slow. Once you have recognized the main issue, you can then take the required actions to fix the problem and give your users an intensified experience..

1. You are doing too much on the main thread

Anyone who begins developing an android application sees this message on logcat “Choreographer(abc): Skipped xx frames! The application may be doing too much work on its main thread.” So what does it actually means? What this says is that the code is taking longer to process and frames are being skipped because of it, It may be because of some heavy processing that developers are doing at the heart of the application or DB access or any other thing that makes the thread to stop for a while.

2. Your asset files are huge 

Assets provide a way to add arbitrary files like text, XML, HTML, fonts, music, and video in the application. If one tries to add these files as “resources“, Android will treat them into its resource system and you will be unable to get the raw data. If one wants to access data untouched, Assets are one way to do it. If the file of the app is loaded with data, the app will therefore run slowly. Keeping the file size of the built app to a minimum is necessary, particularly for mobile devices. Firstly, you should determine which Assets contribute most to it, because these Assets are the most likely candidates for optimization.

3. You are using an outdated SDK version

The Android Software Development Kit (SDK) is a significant part of Android development. It’s a collection of files bundled collectively that you will need to begin creating Android apps. It consists of tools like the virtual device manager (emulator) and ADB bridge, as well as a library of new code for making Java programs work with the Android platform. So in case you are using an outdated SDK version then it may slow down your app. Once you install Android Studio, it’s simple to keep the Android Studio IDE and Android SDK tools up to date with automatic updates. So it’s necessary to update the Android SDK on a time interval.

4. You are using bad libraries

Developing an Android application without Android libraries’ magic is always a wearying job. Libraries help to lessen the time, effort, and money required for the creation of an Android app. Some of the best android libraries are Dagger 2, Picasso, Retrofit, Glide, Zxing, CAMView, Stetho, and ButterKnife. But there may be problems with the libraries and Software Development Kit provided by the trader which are out of the control of the developer. The developers require to review the code of third-party libraries to detect if it contains errors or bugs. If the libraries are not reviewed carefully, the application may be lagging. Guarantee that you’re using secure, durable, and reliable libraries that have a huge community.

5. Your code is inefficient

Code efficiency is a phrase used to explain the reliability, speed, and programming methodology used in writing codes for an application. It is directly linked with algorithmic efficiency and the speed of runtime execution for software and remains the key element in ensuring high performance. So it’s necessary the developers have a high command of the algorithm and they always choose the best algorithm to speed up the execution of the application. 

6. The speed of the network

A slow network can hugely affect your application’s performance. It doesn’t involve the network itself, but the aids that most network-based applications depend upon. If you want to fix this problem, you should check the network speed all the time and find the app slows down.

7. Chatty conversations

Another obvious cause of application slowness is the chatty conversation: one application server, or possibly the client itself, will make many small requests to complete a transaction on behalf of the person running the application. Nevertheless, with the appearance of virtualization, the server team may have configured the automatic migration of the server image to a lightly loaded host. This might run a server image to a location that sets it several milliseconds further away from other servers or from its disk storage system. And milliseconds can pile up quickly.