I have been testing with the mobile app recently on Android and doing some development work/customization. The rest of my site is relatively fast, with the occasional lag due to normal Acumatica caching stuff going on in the background. The mobile app, on the other hand, is a different story. There is a consistent delay when moving between screens in the mobile app that is annoying if you are a developer, and catastrophic if you are trying to run a dsitributed warehouse operation with many workers in many locations.
Often when performace claims are made on this thread, I find that they get hand waived away with vague suggestions about contacting support for tuning or analysis. In researching what is publicly available about the mobile app architecture, it seems at some point the decision was made to store the entire site map inside the database itself. It seems that this may necessitate a lot of extra database requests to even navigate between screens in the app, and this could be leading to performance issues?
It is my intention to get into this more, and I’m hoping this thread might be a place where we can share best practices for tuning the mobile application and improving its speed. It is important to consider that design decisions that get made on the programming side do eventually impact business productivity, especially when things hang or load slowly for high touch/high speed work like warehouse picking and shipping.
I’m also interested in anecdotes from users actually running the mobile application live. Does it perform well? Are there complaints about speed from workers? When I have discussed this with Acumtica VARs, the suggestion is often to abandon the Acumatica WMS for other products. I would prefer to use Acumatica WMS if it can be made to perform quickly enough, but the anecdotal evidence right now is that it might not be possible.
I should also note that this is really specific to the WMS portion of the app. I think the rest of the app can probably have some minor delays without too much trouble, as it is probably not the main way people will interact with Acumatica. It also seems like it would be possible to leverage the thickclient container for the Acumatica mobile app to increase performance by doing local caching.