Android Splash Screen

AnswerIs42

Whatever blogs/instructions I read about Android development, they all agree you need a splash screen when your app first boots up. This is to allow the device to load the app into memory and various other bits behind the screen. The splash screen usually lasts about 3 seconds, then say another 1.5 secs for my app to get to the home screen.

When using the Boards Mobile App, I noticed that they don't have a splash screen at all. In fact, the Boards app seems to load completely within 2 seconds which seems to go against all the blogs I've been reading.

Does anyone know how they are doing this or indeed, how to speed up the loading of the app so you don't even need a splash screen?

jester77

Splash activity should not take anywhere near 3 seconds, it doesn't even have a resource file. It just uses a custom theme and you specify what drawable to show.

e.g.

<item name="android:windowBackground">@drawable/splash_screen</item>

If your app is taking so long to load, then you are doing too much at startup. Just load what is immediately needed and then lazy load the rest.

AnswerIs42

Thanks for the reply Jester77.

What I should have said is that I am using the Xamarin Forms framework instead of native.

Having read their blogs/forums for ages, the splash screen taking about 3 seconds is actually pretty good. It's just of the few downsides of using the framework. I'll just have to live with it

Atomic Pineapple

Isn't Xarmin supposed to compile into native code? If so there's no way it should take 3 seconds to load?

On a Splash Screen itself, there should never be a need to have one.

AnswerIs42

In the MainActivity of your android Project, there is a line like "Forms.Init(this)". This is what fires up the xamarin but can take 2 seconds to run hence the delay and need for a splashscreen

colm_c

Unfortunately these are some of the trade offs you have to live with when you use a cross platform framework.

For a polished, optimised application there is no substitution for native apps.

Sorry, not much help for the OP!

Atomic Pineapple

AnswerIs42 wrote: »

In the MainActivity of your android Project, there is a line like "Forms.Init(this)". This is what fires up the xamarin but can take 2 seconds to run hence the delay and need for a splashscreen

Wow, just wow, that is bad, just bad.