How Swiggy Makes Swiggy Buttery Smooth
Original post Making Swiggy Buttery Smooth
Article Summary
Swiggy's iOS team cut their app launch time in half and reduced app size by 8MB. Here's how they did it.
The Swiggy engineering team shares 8 concrete optimizations they implemented to dramatically improve their iOS app performance. This is a masterclass in measuring what matters and systematically eliminating friction.
Key Takeaways
- Reduced first screen load from 6 seconds to 3 by parallelizing API calls
- Prefetching cut Food tab load time from 2 seconds to 0.5 seconds
- Used 2x images instead of 3x on high density phones, halving download size
- Built custom navigation system to fix broken swipe gesture transitions
- Added in-app cache clearing, giving users control over storage consumption
By focusing on user-perceived performance metrics and smart sequencing, Swiggy achieved measurable improvements across every key interaction in their app.
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What This Article Covers
Menu detail pages were slow because dish images were large files. Users had to wait noticeably longer when browsing restaurant menus.
Swiggy's team added progressive image loading. Small placeholder images appeared first while high-resolution versions downloaded in the background. Once ready, the full images replaced the placeholders without any visible transition.
Users saw content appear right away without extra network requests. The loading delays became invisible, making the experience feel faster and smoother overall.
This page summarizes “Making Swiggy Buttery Smooth” by Swiggy, published Aug 15, 2023. All credit for the original work goes to the authors.
