Optimizing Flex Mobile Applications(not Games)

The original post said there's updaes for games but (spark) components don't feel native.

Then realize the GPU is about 25 gigaflops faster per second and utilize it.

You can't achieve native performance in most situations. Doing anything ARM/Flash-centric you will always find spark native components are slower than their native counterparts. Even hand-coding them (e.g. blitting) will get you no more performance, just more lines of code and more headaches.

This should be obvious.

Aside that you need to weigh in that the code base you build for your app can mostly be used to output an app for several other targets (if you speak XCode). AIR for IOS, Android and Blackberry. That's both phones and tablets. Also Desktop Mac OSX and Windows as well as the Web (without AIR).

So if you want native performance, be prepared to build your app from scratch several times. The performance loss of going the Adobe route gives you the flexibility of exporting your app to multiple targets. That justifies the so-called "boggy" performance for me and my multi-billion dollar clients.

I've been working on Flex mobile applications (not games) for quite some time now as well. I couldn't achieve the performance of a native application of course. But I think the execution is still smooth enough most of the time.

The universal answer to your question is to use the Profiler in Flash Builder and fix the performance problems you find in your action script code. Make sure that your profiler is set up to show Flash SDK code as well. Because that's where sometimes the problem is. That's the easiest step. And it can be the most efficient one because as I discovered myself the performance of ActionScript code on mobile devices is quite dissappointing. The next step would be optimizing [render] and [pre-render] phases of the execution. You can easily find ton of information on that on the Internet.