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Developing an iOS app from scratch is a completely different story from scaling an existing iOS app while focusing on important aspects like growth and performance. Designing and developing an app that can be scaled efficiently truly defines a successful app. Whether you are looking for ways to handle the ever-growing popularity of your app or want to optimize its performance, there are certain strategies you and your team need to follow when scaling your app.
Continue reading. In this blog post, we will explore the key strategies that can help your app reach new heights without compromising on performance. These strategies will ensure that your app is functional and ready for the future.
Architecture Design
When it comes to scaling iOS apps, it is important to have a well-planned and organized architecture design, as this is what defines how your existing app will be able to adapt to future changes while maintaining performance.
Here are the strategies you can follow to improve the architecture design of your app:
Have a Scalable Architecture
A scalable architecture will allow you to add new features to your app while maintaining the existing features without risking breaking any functionalities. This is a perfect method that offers flexibility and growth without affecting performance.
In this scenario, you can divide your app’s different features into individual frameworks. For instance, aspects like UI components, design elements, authentication, and networking can all be separately developed, tested, and deployed.
Having a separate design pattern like Clean Architecture or MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) clearly distinguishes data from user interface. It keeps UI in the ViewModel, which helps keep Views lightweight.
Dependency Injection (DI)
Dependency Injection (DI) is a performance factor that helps dissociate various app components, enabling developers to test and maintain new and existing features while reducing code duplication.
You can use libraries like Resolver or Swinject to automate dependency management. Moreover, developers can inject it into the code instead of hardcoding a dependency.
Feature Flagging
If you are looking for a way to gradually roll out a new feature without releasing a new version of the app, you should use Feature Flagging. It is a simple yet powerful functionality that lets developers enable and disable features for experimental purposes and A/B testing before rolling them out to everyone.
For better integration of Feature Flagging, you can use tools like Firebase Remote Config, LaunchDarkly, or Optimizely. These tools are designed to help you remotely manage features while offering granular controls and rollback safety.
By creating loosely coupled modular systems, developers can quickly maximize the app’s overall performance when adding new features, changing codes, and optimizing the performance of the existing feature. This approach allows iOS apps to grow organically while maintaining code quality and support seamless expansion without compromising the system integrity.
Performance Optimization
When scaling iOS apps, the custom iOS app development services provider and their team must focus on certain performance optimization strategies to manage memory while keeping resource consumption at the minimum efficiently. This ensures that the app remains responsive, fast, and works efficiently even if it starts to serve a larger user base.
Here are the strategies you can implement to optimize the performance of your app:
Measure and Monitor Performance
Measuring and monitoring existing performance is key to determining how to further optimize and enhance it. Developers can use profiling tools to identify bottlenecks in the app’s overall memory usage, disk, CPU, or network usage.
Certain Xcode tools, like the time profiler, can help analyze and find the sets of codes that are intensive for the CPU. A memory graph usually helps detect memory leaks, and an energy log can be used to measure the overall impact on the device.
Optimize Startup Time
To enhance user experience, you need to optimize startup time and make it faster so users can reach the main page quickly without any delay. For this, background initialization adds a background thread to start insignificant components after launching the app.
Developers can keep an analysis record of startup time using the app launch template and make sure to prioritize the appearance of the main screen on the app launch instead of loading other dependencies.
Improve UI and Rendering Efficiency
The user interface is the part of the app that the user interacts with, and it directly impacts overall user satisfaction. We all know that an unoptimized UI will lead to unwanted lags, resulting in high energy consumption and negatively impacting the user experience.
Developers can use Debug Overdraw, available in Xcode, to help identify unnecessary rendering passes. Moreover, view hierarchies have to be simplified wherever possible while avoiding overlapping transparent views.
In addition to the strategies mentioned above, developers need to monitor and benchmark app performance continuously using tools like XCode’s performance testing frameworks. This will help identify and solve scalability issues before they affect user experience.
Network Efficiency
When scaling iOS apps, optimizing the network and enhancing its efficiency are important to ensure the user gets smooth and responsive performance while putting less strain on the battery and reducing latency overall.
Here are some of the key strategies you can implement to optimize the performance and network efficiency of your iOS app:
Secure and Optimize Connections
It is important that the connections are secure and optimized to protect your app users’ data and enhance trustworthiness. Security can be enhanced by implementing an HTTPS socket layer along with SSL and TLS encryption for all traffic.
Using HTTP/2 protocol for streams offers reduced latency through iOS’s native “URLSession.” Also, data downloading and uploading in the background can be further optimized through the execution of “URLSessionConfiguration.background.”
Adding Offline Support
Suppose you have an app that can work both online and offline. In that case, we highly recommend adding offline-first functionality, as it is important for creating a seamless user experience, especially for users in areas with limited connectivity or when they are experiencing network issues.
To further enhance the offline support, developers can use local data storage by using databases like SQLite, Core Data, and Realm. All of these help keep data locally on the device, and once the connection is restored, it will sync data with the server.
Asynchronous Networking
In the newer versions of iOS, a modern networking system using asynchronous operations has been incorporated. This system is designed to avoid blocking the main thread while ensuring the user can interact smoothly with the app.
These can be implemented using Swift “async/await” API to help with simple asynchronous calls and improve readability. GCD can also be used to limit the total number of concurrent connections, which helps diversify the network load.
IOS apps can maintain performance and user experience across diverse network environments by creating intelligent, adaptive networking architectures.
Memory Management
Effective memory management is always important when improving an existing iOS app or planning to build a scalable app. We have seen that most app crashes happen due to poor memory handling, as the system automatically force-closes the app, which leads to a lower user experience.
To help you out, the following strategies and techniques can be followed to add better memory management when scaling iOS apps:
Resolving Memory Leaks
Memory leaks are important to be taken care of to avoid unwanted crashes, which can badly impact user experience. Memory leaks happen when memory is allocated for the app but it doesn’t release once the need is over, this leads to excessive memory consumption overtime leading to performance degradation, sluggishness, and crashes.
Developers can use Xcode Instruments and select Leaks tools to actively monitor app memory usage. Within the stats, you need to look into the objects that remain in memory and cannot be released or deallocated.
Improve Image Handling
Images consume a lot of memory due to their overall resolution and dimensions, especially when the app project uses large assets and multiple images. To ensure all the images are handled smartly and efficiently, it is important to use images with appropriate resolutions while avoiding the usage of high-resolution images unless necessary.
Moreover, it is important to set up image caching, which helps avoid downloading the same images multiple times. The best strategy is to use disk and memory caching to optimize the performance further.
Efficient Handling of Large Data
If your app has a large data set, including CSV, JSON, and media files, then there is a high chance that all of these must be putting a lot of strain on memory consumption, especially if these large data are not managed correctly.
Developers need to adopt a lazy loading technique that helps load data incrementally and fetch the required data only. Moreover, memory mapping can be used with NSData to help the app read data portions from the disk. All of these combined can significantly improve app responsiveness.
By mindfully creating architectures that effectively manage memory, iOS apps can maintain performance and stability even when you are scaling while handling all the newly added features.
Concluding Thoughts
Scaling iOS apps for growth and performance enhancements is not only about writing codes. The dev team needs to follow smarter and more efficient strategies, which we discussed in the blog post. These strategies focus on proper architecture design, performance optimization, network efficiency, and memory management. Combining all these allows you to easily scale apps without compromising on performance.
The key is to develop flexible, performance-focused architectures that will continue to grow with the shifting technology and user expectations. Remembering these aspects while scaling apps can ensure long-term success and user satisfaction.
