A software engineer, Joseph Ajayi, has cautioned that the growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into mobile applications may deliver smarter services but also threatens to slow down performance and frustrate users.
Ajayi, a React Native developer with years of experience building apps for healthcare, fintech and e-commerce sectors, said the rush to add features like real-time recommendations, natural language processing and on-device machine learning (ML) models often comes at the expense of speed and stability.
He noted in a statement that users most often don't care how intelligent an app is if it lags or freezes, saying that a half-second delay can mean the difference between a five-star review and an uninstall.
He explained that AI-driven functionalities require significant CPU usage and memory consumption, continuous data synchronization, which can lead to increased battery drain, higher crash rates and poor performance on mid-to-low-end devices.
Ajayi recounted a recent e-commerce project where the addition of a sophisticated AI recommendation engine doubled user engagement but also caused the crash rate to spike from 0.5 per cent to over 2 per cent.
"What made it worse was that we didn't have proper monitoring in place for the AI components," Ajayi explained. "Traditional performance metrics don't capture the unpredictable resource consumption patterns of machine learning inference. We were flying blind until we implemented proper observability around our AI features."
## The Hidden Reliability Costs of AI Integration
According to Ajayi, one of the biggest challenges teams face is maintaining reliability when AI services fail. He emphasized the importance of building fallback mechanisms and graceful degradation into AI-powered applications.
"We learned to always have fallback modes during our Black Friday incident," he said. "When our recommendation engine went down due to a third-party ML service outage, users still needed to browse products effectively. The apps that survived were those with intelligent circuit breakers and backup functionality."
He noted that AI integration often introduces complex dependency chains that traditional mobile apps don't face. External ML APIs, real-time data pipelines, and cloud-based inference services all become potential points of failure that require careful monitoring and contingency planning.
## Performance Monitoring in the AI Era
Ajayi stressed that teams need to rethink their approach to performance monitoring when AI features are involved. Standard metrics like response time and memory usage don't tell the complete story when machine learning models are processing user data in real-time.
"You need to track P95 and P99 latency specifically for AI operations, monitor model inference times separately from general app performance, and set clear Service Level Objectives for AI-powered features," he explained. "We've seen cases where an AI feature works perfectly 90% of the time but creates terrible user experiences during the remaining 10%."
He recommended implementing feature flags for AI components to enable quick rollbacks when problems arise, and using canary deployments when updating machine learning models in production.
## Real-Time Features: A Performance Multiplier
He said: "Users have become incredibly sophisticated. They might not understand the technical complexities behind their favorite apps, but they instinctively know when something feels off.
"What I've discovered is that perceived performance often matters more than actual performance. An app that loads data in two seconds but shows immediate visual feedback feels faster than one that loads in 1.5 seconds but shows a blank screen.
"Every app today wants real-time features. Live order tracking, instant notifications, real-time chat, live data synchronization - users expect their apps to be as responsive as their thoughts. But here's what nobody tells you: real-time features are performance multipliers. Every real-time connection requires careful capacity planning, every live update needs intelligent caching strategies, and every persistent connection must be monitored for resource leaks."
Ajayi emphasized that managing real-time AI features requires understanding their unpredictable scaling behavior. Unlike traditional CRUD operations, AI workloads can vary dramatically based on data complexity and user behavior patterns.
## Case Study: Healthcare App Optimization
The software expert noted that one of his most challenging projects was a healthcare application where delays in loading patient records could directly affect care delivery.
According to him, the app initially took three to four seconds to load critical information, which created unacceptable lags for medical staff.
"The AI-powered diagnostic suggestions were impressive, but when doctors had to wait four seconds for basic patient data, the smart features became irrelevant," he said. "We had to completely rethink our architecture around reliability-first principles."
He revealed that after three months of intensive optimization focused on performance SLOs and proper load testing with AI workloads, his team achieved a 60 per cent improvement in performance, drastically reducing wait times and improving overall user satisfaction.
## Best Practices for AI-Ready Apps
He explained that to avoid such performance pitfalls, developers should optimize apps for low-end devices rather than testing solely on premium models, implement lazy loading to prevent unnecessary data overload, use intelligent caching to cut down redundant API calls without risking stale data, and continuously measure performance in real-world conditions.
Ajayi also stressed the importance of proper capacity planning for AI features. "Unlike traditional features, AI workloads don't scale linearly. A recommendation engine that works fine with 1,000 users might completely break with 10,000 users due to the computational complexity involved."
He recommended implementing robust monitoring for AI service dependencies, using circuit breakers to handle ML service failures gracefully, and maintaining comprehensive performance budgets that account for the true cost of intelligent features.
## The Future of Performant AI Apps
"As AI becomes a standard feature in mobile applications, the challenge will not only be to make them smarter but to ensure they remain fast, stable and reliable for millions of users," he said.
Ajayi added that the best apps are often the simplest ones, noting that the fastest code is the code that doesn't run and removing a feature is often better optimization than adding a new one.
He cautioned developers to approach AI integration as a trade-off rather than a free upgrade, emphasizing the need for proper Site Reliability Engineering practices when deploying AI at scale.
"Building performant mobile apps at scale isn't about following a checklist or implementing the latest framework. It's about understanding the fundamental trade-offs between features and performance, between user experience and technical complexity.
"Every app has a performance budget. Every AI feature has both a computational cost and a reliability cost. The art lies in spending that budget wisely, creating experiences that feel magical while running smoothly on real devices in real-world conditions," he added.