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.