I'm developing a webbapp for iOS and Android, primarily. The problem is that it tends to run slow on the android phone (testing made on Samsung Galaxy S2). I've tried a couple of different frameworks together with PhoneGap without any good result.
My experience this far (on android):
Dojo toolkit: (v1.7.1)
Pretty good but flickers alot when doing transitions between different views and the input forms performs badly.
Sencha Touch: (v1.1)
Not very responsive and flickers a bit during transitions. Changing orientation takes awfully long.
JQTouch: (beta 4)
Runs smooth but the layout is broken on android (back-buttons etc that uses CSS transform rotate and translate)
My question is:
Have any of you found a framework that works well on both iPhone and Android devices? or is the only solution to develop native?
On a side note I've noticed that Sencha touch 2.0 has focused on Android performance but there's only a developer preview available at this time and is not going to be release before Q2 2012.
What I have found is that many of the frameworks work just great but the root cause of the problems is earlier versions of Android's support for CSS3 style transitions. You are probably better off avoiding or disabling these transitions.
Related
I'm trying to build a website using the technique described in this article: pure CSS parallax.
This technique requires browsers to support 3D transforms (and specifically perspective/preserve 3d).
It's working on the majority of devices and browsers no problem, and where it doesn't it is easy to detect if it'll break (such as lack of transform-style: preserve-3d in IE, or lack of 3d transforms at all) and fix it accordingly.
However, one browser stands out in exceptionally f*******g me over when I try and make it compatible to any degree - Android stock browser. Versions of the browser on Android 4+ support css3d transforms but are completely incapable of rendering them properly, with the big bug being that -webkit-perspective: 1px, while technically supported has absolutely no effect in this case (transform: translateZ(xpx) elements).
As far as I see it I have two options:
Detect the Android stock browser and serve CSS accordingly
Detect perspective not to be working and serve CSS accordingly (unlikely)
I've yet to find a foolproof/futureproof, elegant way of detecting the Android browser on the back end with PHP, with the only options being hefty API's and what I consider to be lacklustre abuse of mobile detection libraries.
I have absolutely no idea how I'd go about doing no.2.
Any help appreciated
I currently develop an hybrid app based on Cordova. My main target is Android devices with at least 2.3 support.
I face performance issues, particularly scrolling which is not really smooth and more generally navigation inside app. So I implemented several tips to increase my app speed such as:
Hardware acceleration
Use the fastest scroller I found (FTScroller)
Use hogan.js for view rendering with pre-compiled template
I tried Famousjs and CocoonJS but it didn't help. I look to crosswalk-cordova, but it increase the size of the app by 15-20mb and I have to keep the size as light as possible.
The app performs pretty good on powerful devices such as my Nexus 5, but it become slow on older/less powerful devices.
So what other tips could I use to increase the speed of my app ?
Many thanks.
"but it become slow on older/less powerful devices", does this issue happens when you are using crosswalk?
I guess on older/less powerful devices, if the performance drops dramatically, it maybe related the the GPU blacklist, Which means on some old devices GPU are blacklisted. To resolve this issue, you can pass '--ignore-gpu-blaclist' option,
see: https://crosswalk-project.org/#wiki/Use-Chromium-command-lines-in-your-apps-on-Android
I am using Cordova and Sencha Touch 2.3.1 to create both Android and Ios apps. The performance of the IOS app is quite good however the android app performance is very sluggish.
The home page comes is quite good shape but as soon as I open any other page the entire font as well as screen color etc becomes dull and screen response time becomes very high.
Any solutions or pointers will be highly appreciated.
I am using:-
Sencha Touch 2.3.1
Corodva 3.3.1-0.3.1
adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20131030
Sencha Cmd v4.0.2.67
Part of the issue may be that iOS has a dedicated GPU and compiles mobile Safari with GPU acceleration, whereas most Android devices don't.
There's going to be a lot of potential answers to your question, it's likely that in some or a few ways that your application isn't following best practices which may be causing it to run slowly. The DOM might be too large, you could be instantiating things when you don't need them and forgetting to destroy them and a whole bunch of other stuff. There's a great video about Sencha Touch best practices I wrote a blog post about here: http://www.joshmorony.com/top-10-tips-sencha-touch-best-practices-review/
I developed an application for android using jquery mobile and phonegap.
I deployed the app to my device over usb. The performance of the app ist really bad, especially while scrolling a longer list.
The strange thing is: The whole app runs smooth if i just open up the browser on my phone and access the index.html directly. Same technology, same content. I do not use the phonegap native api or anything similar.
Tested with phonegap 1.5.0 and 1.7.0rc1, jquery mobile 1.1.0 on android 4.0.2.
Any ideas?
On honeycomb (3.0), Ice cream (4.0) and posterior devices, you can boost performance by adding the following in the < Application ... > tag:
android:hardwareAccelerated="true"
You could set the minSdk to 8 (Android 2.2) for compatibility and the targetSdk to 15 (Android 4.0) and that would make hardware acceleration work when its available on the device only.
I believe that with this flag the performance of my apps is equal to running them in the browser, so I guess its because the browser was coded with hardware acceleration :)
I had a similar problem: a page with a longer list of "medium complex" themed divs. The browser of HTC phone had no problems in displaying. But within the phonegap app rendering failed completely. I saw a kind of WSOD, which disappeared only after touching the display. After touching, the page was displayed correct.
The problem was not in place, when I shortened the div-list to one or two div-elements or when I reduced the sub elements within the divs and reduced the render effort caused by the css complexity.
The white screen looked like, if the whole body was invisible, since only the documents background-color was displayed (I added a light pink for this). So I guess, the rendering was the problem after reading this thread
I tried the various proposals I found in this thread to make the app work without the "WSOD". But nothing worked. Some of them made the app displaying really worse.
Finally, after a whole day of searching, I made it. I set within the tag (not the tag) of my AndroidManifest
<application android:hardwareAccelerated="false" ...
Now the app behaves in the same fast way as my webbrowser. Seems like, if hardware acceleration is not always the best feature...
My versions:
phonegap 3.5.0, Android 4.0.3, jQuery v2.1.0, HTC Sense 3.6
Found an answer here: http://groups.google.com/group/phonegap/browse_thread/thread/94da1cf881abe995/6d4f7aea7aeba523?lnk=gst&q=performance
There is probably a difference between the native browser and the webview in terms of javascript performance.
If you can confirm the browser performs better (that it's not something suboptimal in your code frustrating one but not the other), you could consider deploying as an html5 offline application so that you will actually run in the browser.
We bumped into performance issues while scrolling the same amount of list items with jquery mobile. The performance was so poor (we didn't even try in PhoneGap environment) that we rewrote the app using iScroll library... now the app scrolls really smoothly.
If you are at the beginning of the development, you could try to change the UI library.
After this situation we deploy our apps to test devices quite often to manage performance issues in time... this became a "policy" :)
After I have compiled and deployed the demo application to my Samsung Galaxy S II I noticed that the Sample PhoneGap App which comes with PhoneGap was not very responsive when pressing buttons and scrolling.
I also made a little app using PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile, with 4 buttons everything was ok, but when I added more than 7 and my viewport needed to be scrolled, scrolling become to be very slow, the more buttons/widgets I had the slower the srolling was.
Is this a bug specific to my mobile device or it is just how PhoneGap works:
The fact that PhoneGap apps feel slow on my phone including the demo?
EDIT:
The same PhoneGap app served by an HTTP server from my laptop and launched in the standard Android browser works very smoothly
Try setting your targetSdkVersion higher. Changing mine from "8" (i.e. Android 2.2) to "14" (Android 4.0) dramatically improved PhoneGap performance on phones running newer versions of Android. Most likely this enables certain performance-enhancing features such as hardware graphics acceleration.
For more info see my other answer about this here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12397768/233370
Since PhoneGap and the frameworks that is used with it (JQM,Sencha Touch etc) are just working in a WebKit browser they can be slow if there's too much to render.
There's actually no bug with your device or etc.It's just that PhoneGap and the frameworks are not so good if you want fast response and so on.You can try your app in other devices and can observe that they behave the same.
I had the same Problems, after Update to Android 4.0.4 my Phonegap (Cordova 2.0.0) & Sencha Touch 2 - APP was very very slow.
But after I insert
super.appView.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_SOFTWARE, null);
the APP works fine, as before the update.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/hardware-accel.html
For improved performance you may not need Phonegap.
If what you need is quick cross platform styling but fast native components try a tool like nativecss.com It keeps the styling in CSS, but uses native components for everything else - so no HTML rendering delays or clunky animations.