11 Tips to Optimize Your React Native App for Better User Experience

In the current competitive mobile app ecosystem, one thing matters the most: a better user experience.

It is simple - Good UX can make or break your business.

Therefore, when it comes to mobile app development, the foremost thing that you need to ensure is that your business application not only has an aesthetically pleasing appearance but is also great in terms of functionality, accessibility, speed, and establishes a significant emotional connection.

We are all familiar with React Native as one of the most popular frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile applications. It helps create innovative mobile apps using a single codebase that can run on multiple platforms, which eases the job of mobile app developers who need to write different code for building Android and iOS apps.

Although React Native is a perfect pick for mobile app development in many ways, there are some tips required to optimize your React Native app for a better user experience. Let’s have a look at them.

#1 Check Resolution and Size of Images

If your React Native app requires showing off a lot of graphical content or images, check their resolution and size to make the app run better. Heavily loaded images and graphical content can cause excessive memory utilization on the device, which can overburden the app’s memory and cause it to crash.

Use a proper image format and size to avoid slowing down the app and improve its performance. Image optimization packages like react-native-fast-image can also reduce images' size while maintaining their quality.

Additionally, you can consider using tools like ImageOptim or TinyPNG to pre-process images to reduce file sizes further before integrating them into the app. This will help your app load quicker, leading to better performance and user experiences.

For example, a fitness app we worked on initially had high-resolution images for workout illustrations, each around 5MB. By using TinyPNG and react-native-fast-image, we reduced the image sizes to 500KB without noticeable quality loss, cutting the app’s initial load time by 50%—from 8 seconds to 4 seconds—resulting in a smoother onboarding experience for users.

#2 Apply Code Splitting Technique

The code splitting technique requires segmenting the codebase into smaller chunks, which are loaded when needed. This helps reduce your app's loading time, making it faster and providing a better user experience.

Also, the dynamic loading approach is an excellent way to reduce the app's initial load times. Libraries like “react-native-lazyload” can complement this technique for specific use cases similar to lazy-loading non-critical components.

For example, if an app feature is not required as soon as the user opens the app, it can be loaded dynamically when it is really needed. This not only saves users’ time but also helps ensure data security and privacy.

#3 Reduce UI Complexity

Keep the app's layout simple and avoid nested components. In this current era, when the user's attention span is decreasing daily, following minimalistic design principles has become very important. Keep required whitespace, apply the right color combinations, limit forms and fields, and use visual hierarchy.

Additionally, you can also consider using tools like “react-native-safe-area-context” which can help you ensure layouts adapt seamlessly across devices, further improving accessibility and expanding the target audience.

Minimizing UI complexity enables you to boost your speed of interaction with your users, reduce cognitive load, and enhance accessibility, ultimately leading to better app performance and user experience.

#4 Avoid Memory Leaks

Memory leaks can kill your app's performance. Make sure that you clean up event listeners and subscriptions. New React Native developers benefit from using functional components like “useEffect” and “React.memo” to simplify resource management. Tools like Redux Toolkit and Zustand can help you reduce memory overhead compared to older state management techniques.

Avoiding memory leaks can keep memory usage within safe limits. Also, it improves battery efficiency, supports long-term sessions, and enhances overall stability in terms of animations, navigation, and transitions in the mobile app.

#5 Optimize Navigation

Navigation is the most crucial aspect of any mobile app, and poor navigation can worsen the app's performance, which ruins the user experience. By using React Navigation’s createNativeStackNavigator, it is optimized for performance and uses native stack views on iOS and Android. Also, you need to minimize the use of shouldComponentUpdate or React.memo in navigation, as they can sometimes cause unexpected behavior.

Optimized navigation reduces the memory footprint, keeps the codebase clean, and improves the performance of an app, ultimately resulting in happy users.

For instance, an e-commerce app we collaborated on had a clunky navigation system, causing a 20% drop-off rate during checkout. By implementing createNativeStackNavigator and optimizing screen transitions, we reduced navigation lag by 30%, which improved user retention by 15% as customers completed purchases more seamlessly.

#6 Minimize the Use of Unnecessary Re-renders

In React Native apps, unnecessary re-renders can impact performance and battery life. Therefore, it is imperative to minimize the use of unnecessary re-renders. You can use tools like React DevTools to identify components that re-render frequently. Use React.memo, PureComponent to compare props and state before re-rendering.

Preventing unnecessary re-renders leads to seamless UI, better battery life, and a more responsive app. So, just make sure that you minimize the use of unnecessary re-renders to deliver better user experiences.

#7 Monitor and Debug Performance Issues

Monitoring and debugging performance issues on a regular basis is important to ensure that your React Native app provides better user experiences. There are tools like React Native Performance Monitor, Flipper, Firebase Performance Monitoring, and more that can track UI functioning and offer insights into app performance across different devices.

Keeping track of performance issues in a React Native app can help save time and costs in the long run. Also, this leads to enhancing app store ratings, downloads, revenue, and brand reputation.

#8 Improve Animations

To provide a wonderful user experience, it becomes imperative to improve animations. You can use react-native-reanimated, the Layout Animation API, useNativeDriver to ease the process of adding or removing elements from animation and maintaining its performance at its best.

Also, make sure that you minimize the use of JavaScript-driven animations whenever possible, use native-driven animations as they don’t rely on the JavaScript thread and are known to be more performant.

#9 Reduce the Size of JavaScript Bundle

If the JavaScript Bundle’s size is huge, it can slow down your mobile app’s startup time. Make sure that you are using the code-splitting technique so that only the necessary code is loaded initially. Also, you can use tools like babel-preset-env, as it can allow you to target specific browsers or environments, reducing the amount of polyfill and helper code included in your bundle. Also, you can only import the parts of libraries that you need to keep the app light and load quickly.

Reducing the size of JavaScript is very important, and make sure that you don’t skip this step while building your React Native app to provide better performance and user experiences.

#10 Enable Hermes

Hermes is a JavaScript engine built by Facebook and optimized for React Native apps. It helps improve app performance, reduce memory usage, decrease app size, and decrease app start-up time. It is available as an opt-in feature for all React Native apps using React Native 0.64. x or higher. Moreover, Hermes now supports improved debugging in newer React Native versions, making it even more appealing to developers.

Enabling Hermes can help you keep your React Native app extremely user-friendly and ensure gaining more conversions, resulting in exponential growth of your business.

For example, a social media app we optimized saw a 40% reduction in startup time—from 5 seconds to 3 seconds—after enabling Hermes on React Native 0.65. This improvement led to a 25% increase in daily active users, as faster load times encouraged more frequent engagement.

#11 Test on Multiple Devices

You need to regularly test your React Native app on multiple devices to ensure that it performs well and keeps users engaged with your business. For that purpose, you can use Jest for unit tests or Detox for end-to-end testing, to ensure optimizations don’t introduce regressions.

Users might have older versions of Android or iOS. Testing your React Native app rigorously before its launch helps you to detect layout issues, broken links, or unreadable text, making the interface easily accessible and look aesthetically pleasing on all devices.

Summing Up

Improving the performance of React Native Apps might be complex, but worthwhile. It is crucial to build applications that are quick, responsive, and intuitive enough to deliver better user experiences. User experience matters a lot when it comes to mobile apps, as people's lives revolve around mobile applications.

Precisely, expert React Native developers React Native developers can confidently overcome the challenges of performance optimization, embracing the best practices in coding and architecture, which lead to better user experiences.