Background:

I have been working on a Hybrid Mobile application for about the last 3 months.  When we first looked at which mobile frameworks to use, I created some initial mockups in JQuery Mobile, Sencha, and Twitter Bootstrap.  After seeing the initial mockups in a desktop browser, my customers like the look and feel of JQuery Mobile the best.  So, away we went on building the application.

When we got to the point of building the native application piece with a WebView for both IOS and Android, we quickly discovered the performance differences between the WebView on both platforms vs a regular mobile browser.  In short, performance from best to worst was, Native Browser, Hybrid IOS, Hybrind Android.  The Android performance in particular was awful, I would even classify it as unusable.  Because of the testing results, my customers have completely put a hold on the Android hybrid app and we are focusing exclusively on the IOS.

My real Questions:

1. What WebView settings are you using in both IOS and Android to help it perform better?
2. The startup time of the WebView is noticeably slow?  What techniques are you using to address this?  I am probably going to put in a native loading/splash screen to address this
3. Is there anything else I can do to help the WebView along?  I am doing the following currently minifying, gziping, keeping my dom elements small.
4. How can I improve the delay when tapping the bars?  For example, there is a noticable delay when touching a navbar and it changes to blue and then goes to the next page.
5. Is there a built in feature to show the spinner anytime the user touches something?  We have been testing session timeouts and when the user touches a link on a listview, there is a small delay where the server is figuring out that the user is timed out and then redirected to the login screen.  From the users perspective, there is nothing visual to indicate that something is going on.  Do I have to hook up my own JQuery or is there something I can leverage in the JQM?
6. Did the new alpha version of JQM address some of these performance issues?  Is it worth upgrading now?
7. Any other performance tips?

Cheers,

JF