Improving Threads' iOS Performance at Meta
InfoQ Homepage News Improving Threads' iOS Performance at Meta
An app's performance is key to make users want to use it, say Meta engineers Dave LaMacchia and Jason Patterson. This includes making the app lightning-fast, battery-efficient, and reliable across a range of devices and connectivity conditions.
To improve Threads performance, Meta engineers measured how fast the app launches, how easy it is to post a photo or video, how often it crashes, and how many bug reports people filed. To this aim, they defined a number of metrics: frustrating image-render experience (FIRE), time-to-network content (TTNC), and creation-publish success rate (cPSR).
FIRE is the percentage of people who experience a frustrating image-render experience, which may lead to them leaving the app while the image is rendering across the network. Roughly, FIRE is defined as the quotient of the number of users leaving the app before an image is fully rendered by the sum of all users attempting to display that image. Measuring this metric allows Threads developers to detect any regressions in how images are loading for users.
Time-to-network content (TTNC) is roughly the time required for the app to launch and display the user's feed. Long loading time is another experience killer that may lead users to abandon the app. Reducing the app's binary size is paramount to keeping the binary small:
