Slow on Android 5 and up

ionic-v1
1

I have been working with Cordova and Ionic for awhile now. After I launched my first big app people have been complaining how slow it is on Android. I thought it was my app so I have been doing intense testing for the last few days. I have come to find out that Ionic is very slow on Android in general. The odd thing is Ionic seems to be working perfectly on Android 4.3. The problem seems to be with Android 5+.
I have created a very simple demo project to prove how slow the app is on Android vs iOS. You will notice in Android the page transitions are very slow and the clicking of buttons seems unresponsive sometimes. In iOS this simple app works flawlessly without any concern.
Does anyone know why this is happening and how we can fix this?
Here is the demo app: https://github.com/buddywa/Ionic-Soda

Thank you

2

After working for two weeks with Ionic2/Angular2/Typescript/AllTheNewGoodies I was immensely impressed with it. However I was only working with it on iOS the whole time and as soon as I switched to check out the app on Android I was highly disappointed. I hope this is something the Ionic Team will fix soon

3

have you tried clockwork with you app?

4

Hi. What is clockwork? Can you provide a link? I can’t seem to find it.

5

I meant Crosswalk:) http://blog.ionic.io/crosswalk-comes-to-ionic/

6

Crosswalk is the working solution. Thank you.
Here is a post that helped me implement Crosswalk:

7

Crosswalk using Intel XDK added about 60 MB to my app and was very unstable.
I tried to use http://blog.ionic.io/crosswalk-comes-to-ionic/2 however after following the instructions exactly on a new app it did not work.
The Crosswalk page says it improves performance for Android 4.0-4.3 however I am having my slow response issues with Android 4.4 and up. I feel like I am missing something?

8

Here is an update to my problem:
It turns out what I was missing is that Cordova does not run well on Android emaulators 4.4 and up (or maybe its 4.5 and up).
If you want to emulate Cordova on Android, use Genymotion with Android Version 4.3 (at least this is what I tested).
However the opposite is true on a real Android phone. I bought an Android phone version 5.1 and it runs my app perfectly. However I am told that Android version 4.4 and older on a real phone will run very slow and will require Crosswalk to fix this issue.
The problem is due to the phones native browser which Cordova uses to run the app.
I hope this helps someone.
Thank you.