A leading fashion retail brand based in Dubai, known for their premium and fast-fashion apparel, was struggling with poor performance on their iOS shopping app. Despite a sleek design, users frequently complained about long load times and slow checkout experiences—leading to negative reviews and declining mobile sales.
Code Elevator was brought in to solve this problem through performance tuning, backend optimization, and user experience enhancements on the iOS platform.
- App load times exceeded 7 seconds on average
- Frequent crashes on older iPhone models
- Laggy navigation between product categories
- Incomplete checkouts due to slow API responses
- Declining App Store rating (from 4.2 to 3.1 over 6 months)
- The retailer wanted a fast turnaround before their seasonal sale campaign launched in 30 days.
Code Elevator assembled a dedicated iOS optimization team with expertise in performance profiling, Swift refactoring, and mobile commerce UX.
Team Composition:
- 2 iOS Developers
- 1 Mobile QA Engineer
- 1 Performance Analyst
- 1 Project Manager
Execution
- Phase 1:Performance Audit & Crash Analysis (1 Week)
Used Xcode Instruments and Firebase Crashlytics to profile performance bottlenecks
Identified heavy UI rendering issues in the product grid
Found inefficient API calls during checkout and user login - Phase 2:Refactoring & Optimization (2 Weeks)
Migrated performance-critical views from storyboards to SwiftUI for lightweight rendering
Batched API calls and implemented caching for frequently accessed content
Optimized image loading with lazy loading and CDN integration
Enhanced checkout process with faster Stripe integration and reduced form fields - Phase 3: Testing & Deployment (1 Week)
Conducted regression testing on multiple iOS devices (iOS 14 – 17)
Ran performance benchmarks to confirm load time reduction
Released update and closely monitored post-launch metrics
The speed boost was incredible—and exactly what we needed before our holiday campaign. Code Elevator’s team was fast, skilled, and strategic in every aspect.
Head of Digital, Dubai Fashion Retailer
Results
- Load Time Reduced: From 7.2s → 2.9s
- Crash Rate: Reduced by 85%
- Conversion Rate: Checkout completion up by 25%
- App Store Rating: Jumped from 3.1 to 4.4 in 6 weeks
- User Engagement: 20% increase in time spent per session
Tech Stack & Tools Used
- Development: Swift, SwiftUI
- Profiling: Xcode Instruments, Firebase Performance
- Testing: TestFlight, BrowserStack
- Payments: Stripe SDK
- Analytics: Firebase, GA4, Mixpanel
