I’m afraid the only way is to give up with ionic for a while if your target is users with mid-low range of smartphones… I’ve tried many ways to speed up a list of only 500 items and I call it “only” because for me, with my background dated in 8-bit world, displaying 500 items on a hardware with 0,5 gb of ram and 700 mhz cpu should be a piece of cake, but it is but not with ionic 
First I used ng-repeat and the result was a total disaster. Then I’ve tried bindonce, own virtual scroll implementations, overflow-scroll, etc. Nothing helped much. Finally I’ve found the collection-repeat solution and this works somehow, but definately app is not responsive and lags. Then I’ve read here on the forum about the crosswalk, but 25 MB of additonal download size isn’t a good idea for a small app like mine. I’ve thought that the only way to have a fast app is to go native way. I was however curious how other phonegap/cordova apps handle lists so I’ve started to download such apps. I realized that their lists are faster and responsive with the feeling of native lists, even clicking on buttons around views feels better. How is this possible? The answer is different framework. So I’ve tried to rewrite the base features of my app to the onsenui from ionic and I couldn’t believe how fast is the list just from the start. No tricks, no “bindonces”, virtual scrolling, etc… Just simple ng-repeat + two filters + some ng-models and the list, even twice bigger (1000 items) than original is smooth like hell. You guys should definately look into this UI or just look on the Batarang’s dependencies tab or $watchCollectionWatch performance tab in your app to find something that will help people without the newest iphones use your UI. I hope that I will be able to use the ionic again in the future, but it must be much faster than now.
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