Part 1: Improving the Retail React Native App Performance
Article Summary
Coinbase cut their React Native app latency by 80% in 12 months. Here's the three-pronged strategy that made it happen.
After migrating to React Native, Coinbase faced compounding performance issues as they shipped features faster. Engineering Manager Jacqueline Teran and Staff Engineer Brendan Lynch share how they systematically improved their mobile app quality through observability, optimization, and cultural change.
Key Takeaways
- Defined Critical User Journeys (CUJs) with real-time tracking and SLO alerts
- Used Relay preloaded queries and React suspense for optimistic data fetching
- Shifted to async trades, eliminating blocking requests during checkout
- A/B tests proved faster experiences directly correlated with higher revenue
- Buy, sell, and convert funnels improved 80% from baseline measurements
By combining observability dashboards, GraphQL/Relay optimizations, and product redesigns like async trades, Coinbase achieved 80% faster checkout flows with measurable revenue impact.
About This Article
After migrating to React Native, Coinbase's JavaScript bridge became a bottleneck. As the team shipped features faster, small millisecond delays kept adding up. Users started noticing the app felt slow, and there were no systems in place to catch these issues early.
Coinbase built observability into Phase I by identifying their most important user journeys and tracking them as North Star metrics. They set up real-time dashboards that showed performance against SLO thresholds. Product teams could now see and own the latency of their own features.
The backend team optimized services using GraphQL field-level latency tracking and made trade processing asynchronous. The submit-to-confirmation step got significantly faster. When they ran A/B tests, the faster experience correlated with higher revenue.