At present, Android dominates worldwide smartphone operating system market. But users have option to choose from over 3.3 million available in Google Play Store. Also, several studies suggest that most users abandon mobile apps after one use. You must explore ways to make your Android app standout in the crowd and deliver optimal user experience to prevent user abandonment. There are a number of factors that make users abandon a mobile app.

Many users abandon mobile apps with inefficient performance. Like mobile websites, Android mobile apps also need to load in 2 seconds to keep users engaged. You must focus on Android application performance to accomplish more downloads, enhance brand image, and take advantage of various app monetization techniques. Also, your Android app development strategy also needs to implement a number of performance improvement tips and best practices.

7 Simple Tips to Improve Android App Performance

1) Optimize App’s Performance based on Cold Start

An Android app can be launched in three distinct states – cold start, warm start and lukewarm start. In warm and lukewarm starts the system brings the app to from the background to the foreground, whereas the app starts from the scratch in cold start. While assessing Android application performance precisely, you need to launch it in cold start. Likewise, you need to improve the performance of the app in cold start. The trick will help you to improve the mobile app’s performance in each of the three states

2) Minimize Resources Loaded in Start-up Time

As noted earlier, most users nowadays expect Android apps to load in 2 seconds. Each time a user clicks on the app icon, the app is initialized along with resources required to display data. You can easily make the Android app load faster by reducing the resources being loads in start-up time. The resources being loaded in start-up time can be reduced in a number of ways – making changes to the code, reducing size of bitmaps, using dependency injection libraries, and loading the basic resources required to display data.

3) Implement Memory Cache

The Android application performance will be impacted if the app sends additional HTTP requests to the server to fetch data. You can easily reduce the number of HTTP requests made to the server by implementing memory cache. The memory cache will display the data captured during previous session and load the data by assuming the option to be selected by the user. However, you must cache both client-side and server-side data. The server-side caching will make the app exchange data with the server and respond to user requests more quickly.

4) Use Custom Views instead of Conventional Layout

In addition to accelerating data exchange with the server, the app also needs to deliver the data to users almost instantaneously. You cannot make the app display information to a user quickly by binding data to the app layout. The layout must be rendered by the user interface immediately to improve Android app performance. You can easily display data to users more quickly by using custom views. The simple custom views will render data more quickly and hide the rendering issues. However, you have to put extra time and effort to build and maintain the custom views.

5) Assess and Improve Performance of Layouts

Along with using custom views, you also need to explore ways to optimize the performance of layouts. You can easily assess layout performance by using a tool provided by Android SDK – Hierarchy Viewer. The tool even allows you to analyze the layout when the Android app is running. Hence, you can use Hierarchy Viewers to detect the layout performance issues that affect Android application performance negatively. At the same time, you can detect the possible view hierarchy optimization by running the lint tool on the layout files. The small changes made to the app layout will help you to improve the app’s loading speed significantly.

6) Load Data before Ads

Most users nowadays prefer downloading free apps. Hence, you must implement app monetization techniques like native ads and in-app ads to generate revenue. But you need to ensure that the app does not display ads to a user immediately after initialization. When you load ads before data, Android application performance will be impacted adversely. Also, chances of user abandonment will increase when the app displays ads immediately after being launched. You must send request to fetch ads after sending requests to fetch data. Likewise, you can keep users engaged by embedding native ads into app content seamlessly.

7) Use Animations to Make the App Appear Faster  

In addition to making your Android app load faster, it is also important to make users feel that the application is really fast. You can always keep users engaged by using animations like loading indicator when the app processes requests or fetch data. The loading indicator will convey that the app is not idle and processing user request. Hence, the user will wait for the process to be completed. However, you cannot keep a user engaged by displaying loading indicators for more than 300 milliseconds.

On the whole, you can improve Android app performance in a number of ways. But you must remember that the performance of an Android app may differ across devices and networks. Hence, you must test the Android app elaborately under varying user condition and resolve all performance issues. The elaborate performance testing will help you to make the app popular and profitable within a short amount of time.