After having finished my app in Adalo and pushing it to TestFlight, I noticed a slight hick up in performance. The app itself is okay, not unusable, but also not particularly joyful to use. I read some other forum posts about other users having similar issues and there is a general consensus about using external databases and some simpler components like simple lists instead of custom lists.
However, my app heavily relies on both and I was wondering if there are any other possible fixes?
A bit more about the app, it is an event discovery app that has one main database with all the events stored in it. I live in Europe, in quite a small country, so the number of entries in the database won’t ever be higher than 150, per my estimations (currently in the tested version there are around 60 events). I am also aware that the Adalo servers are in US so there will always be that problem when it comes to loading the data from the database. Furthermore, I have one screen that has 5 custom lists, all made using same logic, that have different colors based on which category the events are classified by (something like blue for sports and so on).
The main problem, I found to be, was the back button taking a couple of seconds to load back the previous site. Also the individual event cards have a button that is used for favoriting the events always loads slower the the rest of the data, much like the google maps component on the same screen. The button has a conditional visibility, which is what is probably causing the slower response time. In addition, whenever I access the screen with all of the events, that also takes a couple of seconds to be loaded.
I understand that these are nit-picky flaws and are probably my own fault, but are there any routes I can take to make the app a bit faster and improve the user experience? I read about moving the data to the likes of Xano or Airtable, but in all honesty, my database will likely not ever be a large one and the tested app has only like 60 entries which should be reasonably fast.
I have provided two screenshots regarding my database and how the list are setup. If necessary I can also provide a short video of how the preview in TestFlight is working.
i am experiencing the same issue on my ecommerce app! and what i found is, my app works a little smooth when i upload a low quality image or a simple list to my database! so you are right about the usage of custom list that slows down the performance and you really can’t do anything about it! the more the no. of items in your database the more lag in the retrieval of database! So the simple solution is to keep it as simple as you can or wait for some while until your app gets popular so much to earn some money to develop a professional app from may be a professional developer!
I hope i am wrong about this and i am looking forward to a solution if anyone has any!
Thank you for sharing your insight and experience!
I will try to keep the lists as simple as possible and upload the images in a bit lower quality. If you wouldn’t mind sharing what quality or website do you use to transform the images to be of the appropriate grade.
Simple lists would be perfect for me if the right right section allowed text instead of an icon!
Also what I found is that the app isn’t necessarily slow, but the components do not load at the same time giving the illusion that it is slow. Taking an extra second or two to load completely would be nicer than the components randomly loading one at a time.
Would love to hear more from others, who have more experience developing using Adalo, on this topic as I think most people would benefit greatly from this!
For the images part, i download normal size from freepik which is the lowest they have. For other images, i just reduce the resolution from the paint app in windows.
Instead of 5 custom lists you can try just having one custom list, but with 5 different colours with conditional visibility that only shows if the category is the correct match. This is worth experimenting to see if it is faster.
Seems like a good idea, but I am not sure how can I do that if the conditional visibility is applied to the whole list. Wouldn’t that make the whole list just one specific color?
If you don’t mind, could you maybe share a couple of screenshots of how you would go about it.
