Best Practices for Enhancing React Native App Performance

There is no denying the fact that React Native is the future of developing hybrid apps. It offers scalability, flexibility, speed, agility, cost-efficiency and excellent performance. No wonder so many successful companies rely on React Native for building their applications. After all, in the age of the Internet, every business needs a high-performing app that squarely satisfies customer needs.

React Native tries to provide everything that is needed to develop a high performing application. But, there are occasions when you may feel the need to optimize your app. You may opt for professional React Native Development Services for improving the performance of your app. Or, you can learn and implement best practices on your own.

Even though React Native is one of the top app development technologies, performance issues with your app may arise occasionally. Therefore, it’s important to pay attention to best practices and performance enhancements for your React Native app while it’s being developed.

In this blog, we will discuss some best practices for improving the performance of React Native apps.

Tips for Improving Performance in a React Native App

Let’s take a dive deep into some of the best practices for effectively improving the performance of a React Native app.

Use Appropriate Navigation Strategies

There are occasions when developers have trouble navigating React Native apps. Navigation issues occasionally prevent apps from giving users a flawless experience. Thanks to an active and large React Native developer community, many navigational problems have already been resolved. However, you may run into some problems that you still need to resolve on your own. Fortunately, there are a number of solutions to these problems, including React Navigation, iOS Navigator, Navigator and Navigation Experiment. React Navigation is preferred by developers for a wide number of apps regardless of size. iOS Navigator is only used for iOS navigation development and can only be used to fix navigation issues with small applications and prototype development.

Avoid Using Scroll View to Render Huge Lists

When it comes to displaying items in React Native with scrollable lists, there are two ways to do it using ScrollView and FlatList components. Displaying a scrollable list by using ScrollView is simple, but on the other hand, it can directly affect the overall performance of the React Native app. This is especially true when there are a large number of items in the list. To fix this issue, experts recommend listing the items with FlatList.

Avoid Passing Functions Inline as Props

When it comes to passing a function as a property to a component, it is better to avoid passing that function inline. At times when the parent re-renders a new reference, which creates another function. Simply put, the child component re-renders even when the props did not change at all. But, there is a solution. Best practices recommend you declare the function as a class method or as a function inside a functional component. In this way, you can remove any possibility of removing references across re-renders.

Go for Resizing & Scaling Images

Make sure you focus on optimizing images, including graphical content, when improving the performance of your React Native app. When you render multiple images in your React Native app, it may lead to high memory usage on a device. Here comes the importance of optimizing images appropriately in terms of resolution and size. If not properly done, your app is likely to crash due to memory overload. Some best React Native app image practices include using PNG format instead of JPG format and smaller-resolution images. You may also utilize WEBP format for reducing the binary size of your images on iOS and Android by almost a third of the original size.

Cache Images

Images are the core component of React Native. This component is used for displaying images, but it does not provide an out-of-the-box solution for resolving several issues, like rendering a large number of images on a single screen, cache loading performance issues, low overall app performance, image flickering, etc. However, there are still ways to deal with these issues. Using third-party libraries like react-native-fast-image is definitely one way. This library works like magic for both iOS app development and Android.

Avoid Unnecessary Renders

When it comes to avoiding unnecessary renders on the main thread of React Native apps, there is an effective optimization technique. You can do it simply by using React .memo() which can handle memorization. Simply put, when a component receives the same set of properties more than once, it will use the previously cached properties and render the JSX view returned by the functional component only once. This reduces overall rendering overhead.

Use Hermes

Hermes is nothing but an open-source JavaScript engine that is mainly optimized for mobile applications. The main function of Hermes is to reduce the download size of the APK, the memory footprint and consumption, along with the time needed for the app to become interactive. If you opt for professional Native App Development Services from an experienced company, it will help you enable Hermes for both iOS and Android.

Conclusion

There are several other optimization techniques for improving performance, so don’t stop learning your best practices here! Using native Driver with the animated library, for example, helps you avoid arrow functions. You’ll also want to avoid excessive use of higher-order components and implementing bulk reducers, while ensuring you use style reference correctly. Though React Native is a popular and high-performing framework, building apps with performance in mind from the very beginning will always improve your results.

Author

Atman Rathod

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