An app that takes a long time to launch or responds slowly to input may appear to the user as if it’s not working or slow. Users expect apps to perform well.
The most essential requirement for any app is smooth and responsive performance. It is no secret that Apple products boast of unmatched performance and superior design as compared to many of their competitors. In this article, we will discuss the techniques that will help app developers optimize the performance of their iOS applications.
Tips and Techniques to Optimize the iOS App:
Use ARC to manage memory
ARC, also known as Automatic Reference Counting. ARC was launched with iOS 5 and it helps in eliminating the most common kind of memory leaks, the forgetful ones. It automatically manages the release cycles in your code. With this, you don’t have to do it manually.
At times, it is very easy to forget the release call at the end of the code block. Automatic Reference Counting manages this automatically and makes it easy for you.
Along with memory leaks, Automatic Reference Counting can also improve your performance by making sure that objects are reallocated as soon as they are not needed. Using Automatic Reference Counting in your projects will optimize overall app performance.
Recognize your target market
Most application developers make the mistake of developing an app without considering the end-user.
Developing an application without considering the needs and preferences of the end-user might not give the actual result.
It is important to have a target audience to develop and design the app around their needs and preferences.
We must start with primary research that includes a common understanding of our target audience and their demographics, such as age, gender, economic condition, relationship status, etc.
Then your secondary research covers the data from the existing company and competitor analysis to recognize the behavioral patterns of your target group.
Launch screen
Launching our app very quickly is more important, especially when users launch it for the first time. First impressions mean a lot for an app. The biggest thing that we can do to ensure our app starts as quickly as possible is to perform as many asynchronous tasks as possible, such as network requests, database access, or parsing data.
To give your users a faster experience, you can design the launch screen in such a way that it seems to be similar to the first screen that they will see.
The HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) of Apple mentions that launch screens can be used to enhance the perception of an app’s responsiveness.
Perfect layout of the content
While developing an application, the essential thing to keep in mind is that the user doesn’t see the code behind the application, as they can see the content and design. The content layout plays the main role in maximizing the user experience.
iOS application developers must focus on the layout of the content as one of Apple’s rules is that the content must fit the screen perfectly. Navigating between the pages must be easy and clear.
Avoid Fat XIBs
Note that when we load a XIB into memory, all of its contents are loaded into memory, including any images. If we have a view that we’re not using immediately, then we’re wasting precious memory. It’s worth noting that this won’t happen with storyboards. Since a storyboard will only instantiate a view controller when it’s needed.
Avoid blocking the main thread
We should never do any heavy lifting on the main thread. This is because UIKit does all of its own work on the main thread, such as drawing, managing touches, and responding to input. The risk of doing all of our applications work on the main thread is that if our code does block this thread, our app will appear unresponsive. That’s a quick route to one-star reviews on the App Store!
Reuse and lazy load views
More views mean more drawing, which ultimately means more CPU and memory overhead. This is especially true if our app embeds many views inside of a UIScrollView. The trick to managing this is to mimic the behavior of UITableView and UICollectionView. Don’t create all the subviews at once. Instead, we create our views as we need them, adding them to a reuse queue when we’re finished with them.
Handle memory warnings
It’s very essential to release all the memory possible when we receive a memory warning. Otherwise, we run the risk of having our app killed by the system.
Reuse expensive objects
Some objects are very slow to initialize- NSDateFormatter and NSCalendar are two examples. However, you can’t always avoid using them, such as when parsing dates from a JSON/XML response. To avoid performance bottlenecks when working with these objects, try to re-use them if at all possible. You can do this by either adding a property to our class or by creating a static variable. Note: if we choose the second approach, the object will remain in memory while our application is running, much like a singleton.
Conclusion
These are some tips and techniques to help developers optimize iOS applications. We hope that these tips are helpful for your projects and daily development life!
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