Performance Budgets for iOS Apps
Performance is marketing dressed as engineering.
Nobody wants to say it, so we will: slow iOS apps don’t grow. You can buy traffic in, pitch investors in, or do a cute launch in Perth—if your app freezes on cold start, users bounce and the App Store buries you. That’s why we set iOS performance budgets the same way you set financial budgets.
A budget turns arguments into facts. When the team wants a heavy library, you ask: does it fit? If not, we find another way.
Budgets to set before you ship.
- Cold start: Aim < 2s on a mid‑tier device.
- App size: Keep it lean; everything you add must earn its keep.
- First screen time‑to‑interactive: Sub‑400ms feels instant.
- Launch network calls: None that block interactivity. Lazy‑load.
These are not religion; they’re guardrails. We tune them per product and device mix, but the principle is the same in Perth, or anywhere else: fast apps convert.
Tooling you actually need.
Use Instruments to profile; MetricKit to watch crash/ANR trends; Xcode Organizer to track size churn. Add CI gates that fail builds when budgets are blown. Nothing focuses a team like a red pipeline. You’ll ship fewer regressions and more features that actually move KPIs.
Cut the bloat: SDKs, images, views.
Third‑party SDKs multiply like rabbits. Audit them. If an SDK isn’t critical to activation or retention, remove it. Compress images; prefer vectors where possible. Keep view hierarchies shallow and predictable. SwiftUI can be very fast when you keep it simple; UIKit still shines for certain heavy lists—pick pragmatically.
Why this raises ratings (and revenue).
Speed changes behaviour. Startup feels instant, friction drops, first action happens sooner. That leads to better reviews, which leads to better ranking, which leads to cheaper acquisition. This is the conversion flywheel nobody wants to talk about because it isn’t glamorous—it’s just effective.
If you want a practical plan for your app, skim our Services and then book a call. We’ll give you a budget set and a checklist in plain English.
City keywords without sounding like a robot.
We build for founders across Perth, , and . If you searched for an iOS app development agency Australia, a SwiftUI developer, or iOS app performance tuning, this is the work you’re looking for. Now let’s make your app fast enough to keep the users you’re paying to acquire.