How did Facebook speed up it's new app

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Facebook released an update to it's Android mobile app and everyone is taking notice of how much faster it is. So how'd they do that?

They completely wrote the app largely in native Android code. The previous version was a hybrid of native and web code. They also reduced garbage collection while using the app which helped it's overall memory usage.
The developer team also wrote a custom event bus to handle on screen events, and they optimized it to work more smoothly while a user is scrolling.
The handle loading images onto the device by loading them into the native heap rather than the java heap.
They wrote a customized listview that helps with the overall load of data that gets loaded while users scroll.