As an integral part of Shopify's ecosystem, our mobile app serves millions of merchants around the world every single day. It allows them to run their business from anywhere and offers vital insights about store performance, analytics, orders, and more. Given its high-engagement nature, users frequently return to it, underscoring the importance of speed and efficiency. At the beginning of 2023, we noticed that our app's performance had decreased since we started migrating to React Native. Recognizing this, we embarked on a dedicated journey to improve the app's performance by the end of the year. We’re happy to report that we have met our goals and learned a ton along the way. In this blog post, we’re sharing how we did it and hope others use it as inspiration to make their apps faster. After all, not all fast software is great, but all great software is fast. Defining and tracking our performance goals Setting the right goals is vital when aiming to improve performance. A fast app is fast, regardless of the technology, and these targets should not take the technology into account. We wanted Shopify App to feel as instantaneous as possible to merchants, so we aimed for our critical screens to load under 500ms (P75) and for our app to launch within 2s (P75). This goal seemed very ambitious in the beginning because the P75 for screen loads at the time was 1400ms and app launch was ~4s. Once we defined our targets we built internal performance dashboards that were real time and supported data filtering based on device model, OS version, etc to help us slice and dice the data and also debug performance issues in the future. This also enabled us to validate our changes and track our progress as
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