We’re experiencing significant performance issues with the Retool Mobile app on Android. The overall app feels sluggish and unresponsive — even on relatively simple pages with minimal components or queries. This issue is not tied to any specific expensive query or large dataset.
Interestingly, the same app performs smoothly on iOS devices. We’ve tested across dozens of Android phones — including newer models — and while performance improves slightly on high-end devices, it still doesn’t come close to the responsiveness we see on iOS.
Has anyone else encountered similar performance discrepancies on Android? If so, we’d really appreciate any guidance or recommendations on how to improve responsiveness and overall UX. I understand that we may not get comparable performance to iOS, but how can we make it usable for our Android users (over 95% of our close to 100 users).
I see that in the past we've noted that Android is generally less performant than iOS (Android slower than iOS - #3 by bca), but we have also made some Android specific improvements since then. I think it would be helpful to see your specific configuration.
Could you share screen recordings? If you can share an app json export, that would be helpful too
Thank you for sharing the recording and app json! Looking at the app, I didn't necessarily see any issues with the configuration jump out. To your point, it's fairly lightweight. I shared the recording and discussed your feedback with our mobile engineering team.
I heard from the team that, despite the previous improvements made in regards to Android performance, your feedback aligns with feedback they're tracking from a couple of organizations about Android app performance (others have reported better performance on Android browsers than the native Android app as well). While it's not something that they are currently addressing on their near term roadmap, it is something we are going to track as a bug. I will follow up with you here if I get any further updates from them in regards to questions for your team, improvements they've shipped, or estimated timelines.
It looks like you've had a few touch points with other folks at Retool since we last spoke, but please let me know if I can help with any other questions/feedback in the meantime!
Hope to have a more exciting update here in the future.
Thanks for looking into this. The feedback that the Andoird browser has better performance aligns with our experience also. Hope that Retool will come out with a fix sometime soon since over 95% of our users use the native Android application.
I hope you find the error, because I have the same problem, my app via Android apk is very slow and however I just tested it via web and it is extremely fast compared to retool apk, and my users are complaining about the low performance on their phones.
I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I’ve raised this issue repeatedly over the past year through various channels, and as you can see from Tess’s response above, it’s clear the team isn’t currently addressing it.
Frankly, the response is surprising - I can understand if feature requests are deprioritized, but for a persistent bug to be left unresolved is concerning.
It does give the impression that the Android app isn’t a priority, despite the size of its user base. That said, we continue to receive complaints from our users on a daily basis. The experience is genuinely poor. General advice from me is to not develop any critical apps on Retool for Android users.
Hello, I've been running performance tests on the phone. Without opening the developed Android application, while interacting with it, the CPU usage spikes are high. Can you share this data with the support team to see if they can pinpoint the performance issue? It's critical for my team to operate smoothly, as our performance has significantly decreased as a result of this.
Thanks for the screenshots, @Jose_Rolando_Lafaurie. Do you know when this started (is this a longstanding issue or recent change from how the app was previously performing)?
We’ve been facing this issue since we started using Retool (>1 year ago). No updates till now despite speaking with half a dozen different people, who have “passed along” to the engineering team, who have responded that since “bandwidth is a bit limited” and that this is not currently on their roadmap.
We have been using the platform for more than 2 years, our initial applications did not have much detail in the graphical interface, but the business has changed and we need to measure more elements of the field, that is why now we have more visual components, reviewing a post I found that another user detected that the auto-growth property of the textarea is one of the causes, I have been testing that for two days and in effect, it improved the performance but it is still slow when more than 10 records are made, in the development of these versions we use design patterns in which you edit and view the record inline there is no need for more than two clicks, using custom collection I suppose that is the cause, the use of those components, but yes the low performance started more than 6 months ago now we notice it more because we have more complex interfaces
Important to take in account
We use offline mode for our work to avoid internet connection problems, and at the end of the day every sale reps upload the work to the server, for that reason the entire work is offline
yes, i have also face the same issue but i have solved the problem by clearing the app cache & by reinstalling it. maybe your phone is soo old and its overall laggy. i want to say to refresh your phone by making a reset. Backup your data and reset your phone. It makes it fresh new. I do reset in every 2,3 months by backing up my data to my PC.
Well, I've had to go back to the previous interfaces, sacrificing usability for better performance of the app on the phone. According to the development team, they tell me that they are focused on the performance of the retool app on iPhone. I have to wait for them to start reviewing Android. I have noticed an improvement by removing the use of the Custom Collection component for the moment. It doesn't fly as expected, but it improves performance a lot.
Thanks for sharing this note about the custom collection with the Retool community Not an ideal solution, but I'm glad it's a path forward for the meantime. I am sharing all feedback from this topic internally, and will reach out with any updates
Hope to have a more exciting update here in the future.
Not an ideal solution, but I'm glad it's a path forward for the meantime. I am sharing all feedback from this topic internally, and will reach out with any updates