Thank you all for using bSteem so far! There have been lots of feedback by our users the past few months, and a lot of them have been taken into consideration. The main issue was performance. We uses expo to quickly deploy release and staging versions of the app. More information on expo here - http://expo.io/.

The Short Version

We decided to destroy some bugs with our almighty wrath and force bSteem to workout everyday so it can be faster and stronger than before.

The Long Version

There were lots of updates and refactoring that had to happen for bSteem, UI wise - it looks similar just a bit more cleaned up. Since we are short on time due to the next focus being designing/architecting Busy V3, we had to get this stable release out. So the main focus for bSteem was performance.

React Native Performance Implementations

• Update all imported packages, we were using react-navigation and the version we used was fairly old. So updating that saw a drastic improvement in the reaction time between screen transitions
• Improving performance on screens with large lists
  • For this we replaced a lot of ListView components to FlatList components and the main part the drastically improved the speed, was adding the getItemLayout prop to the FlatList. getItemLayout is a prop that takes in a function which tells the exact dimensions of the items in FlatList component.
  • this article gave a good explanation of it - https://medium.com/@jsoendermann/sectionlist-and-getitemlayout-2293b0b916fb
• Since performance wasn’t a priority and getting to market was more important, there were lots of techniques outlined here - https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/performance.html that were done. Such as:
  • Removing console.log’s from production builds with the babel plugin - babel-plugin-transform-remove-console
  • Adding unbundling and inline-requires, essentially there were components that were loading components on the screen that were not being used. Good description here - https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/performance.html#unbundling-inline-requires
• Splitting big components up into small components, and creating more PureComponents and Components with the shouldComponentUpdate function
  • This was one of the biggest changes, that really helped with performance. I had noticed that going from a feed to a single post actually re-rendered the entire feed before navigating to the post. This was because of react-navigation, the navigation prop that was being passed to different components in the post previews on the feed, would be different so it would cause all the post previews on the feed to be re-rendered, when going to any screen whether it be the user, votes, comments screen, etc.. Since then the post preview component and a long with other big components have been split up into many different pure components or components with shouldComponentUpdate function.
    • TLDR: Refactored a lot of things, use PureComponents and always try to implement a shouldComponentUpdate if necessary

Conclusion

Thank you guys again for using bSteem and providing feedback via the #bsteem channel on discord

We are hard at work on planning out Busy V3 & updating bSteem along with it, to give you a preview see this post from a year ago. https://steemit.com/busy/@fyrstikken/til-what-busy-org-is-working-on-and-why-it-will-blow-our-steeming-minds

Known Issues

• Android performance on low-end devices are still a problem and hopefully we are able to do something about this in the future.

Download bSteem here

IOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bsteem/id1354894604
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bsteem.bsteemapp