Question

I’ve been looking at some very great online services iPhone app, such as the Twitter app. It’s very robust, I can’t crash the app no matter what I do.

When I try to build one, I always get crashes whenever there’s something wrong, like no internet, wrong passwords, etc. Especially I notice that my app crashes when I switch between tab bars too quickly (when one of them is waiting for a response from the Twitter server, for example). How do I elevate this issue?

Is there any tips to build apps that never crashes like Twitter for iPhone?

Answer 1

I have written such an app (a shopping app that uses the network for everything). Here are some tips:

• Implement reachability so you know when the network is there (and keep checking it)
• Run all network access asynchronously so the app does not freeze, thread networking when you can.
• Send and receive the smallest amount of data per request. For example, in my shopping app, I only get 50 products per search, with only the SKU, description and price. Use JSON.
• Round trip – request network data – as infrequently as possible, and at most once per screen. If you can do with the data you have in memory, do so.
• Lazy load images
• Cancel all network connections as soon as possible. As soon as the tab changes, kill any outstanding network access.
• Cache, cache, cache. Its always quicker to get data locally.

Hope this helps.