Thursday, June 14, 2012

SenchaTouch is slow to load as a mobile web app

The mobile web application for Internet Polyglot http://m.internetpolyglot.com (doesn't work in Firefox since it doesn't support WebKit) has been deployed to production a couple of months ago and shows very poor results in terms of user bounce rate. Too many users are dropping off almost immediately.

The application is written in SenchaTouch. There had been many thoughts about what framework to use for this app at the time. First idea was that it must be HTML5 as opposed to a native iOS or Android app - for the purpose of single code base. Then a decision was made in favor of SenchaTouch before jQueryMobile because anekdotally SenchaTouch was more powerful as a app development platform. And wrapped in PhoneGap it would serve also as a deployable app on Apple Appstore and Android Market.

But the problem is the loading speed. When I open the app in my iPhone's browser it takes too long time to show even the splash screen. I suppose it loads SenchaTouch libraries first and they are big. Maybe SenchaTouch cannot be used for mobile web apps? Maybe it's only for development of PhoneGap'd apps?

Recently the app was rewritten in SenchaTouch 2 but I don't see much of loading speed improvement.

If anybody knows how to speed up the loading of an app written in SenchaTouch - please comment.

1 comment:

diego507 said...

Hello Mikhail. did you do a sencha sdk command to packaged the app? for compress the sdk to production. sencha app build native (build app for android) its also need the android tools. I have a issue with a sencha app wrapped with phonegap that it takes like 5 seconds to load the app in the phone and i supouse it is because it is loading all the sencha sdk classes not only the needed in my app. still looking to a great guide in sencha touch docs about this but none.