Poor performance on windows phone

[shas...@urbandrive.in]

Hi folks,

I have developed an "medium complex" app, deployed and tested on Android phones. It seems to work fine. But when I tried to deploy the same on a Windows 7/8 Phone then the app performs poorly. Please note that the windows phone is new, is lightly loaded and weren't many apps running when I tested my app.

Here are some of the issues that I noticed

1. The next form that needs to be loaded when I click a list item on the main page takes an awful lot of time and also the UI transition is broken i.e. UI rendering from 1st page to 2nd page is not proper and seems broken.

2. When I try to scroll on the main page list then the scrolling experience is very poor with very big time lag. In fact scrolling doesn't seem to work as expected. 

3. Sometimes the  phone hangs and doesn't load the next page at all.

I thought deploying the same app on windows should work seamlessly with minimum changes or tweaking. I am not expecting 100% smoothness but the app doesn't seem to work at all. Not sure how to proceed from here. 

I am trying to understand-

1. Is this a windows specific issue/s that needs to fixed?

2. Does my app need extensive performance tuning before it can be deployed on other platforms?

3. Is the phone faulty (seems highly unlikely)

4. Am I missing something really simple here.

My "medium complex" does things like - 

-Makes webservice calls in the background

-programattic renderer does rendering some of the pages

-uses phone storage to store userid, etc

- uses the mapper theme shipped with codename one.

Please advise.

Thanks,
Shashank

P.S. I am happy to shared the code base if that helps. Mine is a free app anyways that is intended for internal consumption by our small set of customers.

[Shai Almog]

Hi,
Windows Phone 7 has only experimental support which we will probably never make into production. Windows Phone 8 support is still slower than other platforms due to limitations introduced by MS.
In the short term there isn't much we can do, MS has effectively tied our hands with their poor choices when it comes to API development. Profiling and improving performance will help but Windows Phone will lag for now.

[Shashank Baravani]

Hi Shai,

Thanks for the clarifications. I would like to understand in a little more details what you mean by limitations on the MS side so that I can communicate the same effectively to my team here who are asking a lot of questions.  Any links or examples that you can paste will helpful.

Also, would it help if you can give us some suggestions on whether we can at least create a abridged version of the app for Windows. We are a small start up and having a functional cross platform will go a long way in getting funds.

Appreciate your help.

Thanks,

Shashank

[Shai Almog]

We had a blog post about this that went into some details a while back (when we announced the windows phone pipeline). The gist is that ms doesn't support a low level graphics api similar to open gl, while still allowing proper fonts and high level widgets.