How to Make Your Mobile App Faster
Article Summary
Essam Fahmy from Deloitte reveals why 70% of users abandon slow apps—and shares the exact techniques that cut load times by up to 70%. If your mobile team treats performance as an afterthought, this breakdown will change how you build.
This comprehensive guide tackles mobile app performance from two angles: immediate user-facing wins (caching, image optimization, launch speed) and behind-the-scenes engineering practices (code efficiency, network optimization, observability). Fahmy combines real-world examples with specific implementation details for both iOS and Android.
Key Takeaways
- CDNs with WebP/AVIF reduce image load times by 40-70% in production
- Parallelizing 5 sequential requests drops network time from 2.5s to 0.5s
- Memory leaks from strong reference cycles freeze UIs and crash apps
- iOS kills apps taking over 20 seconds to launch; Android targets under 5s
- Crashlytics breadcrumbs and non-fatal logs reveal patterns before crashes spike
Performance optimization requires both quick wins (lazy loading, compression, caching) and disciplined engineering (background threading, proper monitoring, eliminating memory leaks) to keep users engaged and prevent the 80% who uninstall after three failures.
About This Article
News apps and feed-heavy platforms often run into memory exhaustion and UI freezes when users scroll through lists with lots of images. The problem stems from caching full-resolution assets like 4032x3024 photos in memory without any smart way to remove old data.
Essam Fahmy suggests resizing images to match display dimensions, such as 1080x1080, before uploading them. Compress them to 0.7-0.8 JPEG quality and use lazy-loading with RecyclerView on Android or LazyVStack on iOS so images only load when they're actually visible on screen.
When you combine this with CDN delivery using dynamic URL parameters like ?w=200&q=70&format=webp, image payload sizes drop by 40-70%. Users can scroll through thousands of items smoothly without the app running out of memory or struggling to decode images.