Time lag before closing Shell flyout menu

[gnout]

Description

I created a new project in VS just by choosing the Shell template. I converted the AppShell to have flyout menus instead of tabs.
In the attached screen cast, when I tapped on the item that is currently displayed (the first tap is on the about page) then the side menu closes very smoothly which is the expected behavior.
When I tap on the second item (which is not currently displayed) then there is lag before the side menu closes. It seems as if the app is frozen for a few milliseconds.

Expected Behavior

I was expecting the closing of the side menu, in all cases, to be smooth

Actual Behavior

When tapping on one of the flyout menu items (not the one that is currently visible), there is a time lag before the flyout menu is closed and it looks (for a few miliseconds) that is app freezes. This behavior is displayed also to views that don;t have any data (i.e the About page)

Basic Information

• Version with issue: 4.2.0.778463
• Last known good version:
• IDE:
• Platform Target Frameworks:
  • Android: 9.0
• Android Support Library Version: 28.0.01
• Affected Devices: Nokia one 3.1, Samsung Galaxy J3

Screenshots

Screen cats is from an actual device and not an emulator

screencast.zip

[lv1il0s]

Seems related to #5216 (which is closed but apparently not resolved). I'm experiencing the same issue on physical devices (Samsung S8, A3, Sony Z1 Compact) and emulators. On the other hand, iOS seems to be smooth. I hope this issue will be looked into soon.

[wagenheimer]

I also have this problem!

[Mikilll94]

Is it going to be fixed? This problem exists from the very beginning and it makes flyout unusable.

[denzerd]

I have the same problem with a really simple setup.
I assume this won't be fixed it is the same bad behaviour as it was for many years with the MasterDetailPage.
The problem is that the rendering of the underlying ContentPage takes that much time that the animation of the menu is interrupted. But even with an empty content page the rendering is not fast enough to not have at least a small stutter. And I'm on a Galaxy S8 which should be powerful enough.
I'm looking for a way to apply the MasterDetailPage workaround to this (a short delay before actually closing the menu), no luck so far.

[VirtualNomad00]

Guess it's still not solved, which is a bit frustrating as this is a major UX issue

[Mikilll94]

@samhouts @jfversluis @davidortinau

[RedChops]

Moving all pages except for one top level ShellContent from the Flyout Menu to MenuItem, navigating to them with GoToAsync, and manually closing the menu is significantly more performant. It's crazy, the performance by going this route is probably on-par with the iOS experience.

There is still an always noticeable shutter when going back to the home page which looks pretty sloppy. This is very unfortunate, especially since it seems like navigation is pretty central to the whole Shell interface. It appears to be a performance hitch related to pushing a new page on to the root of the navigation stack alone.
I found above to be not entirely correct actually. The hitch on back navigation to the home page in my case was caused by a logic problem issue causing the OnAppearing method to always fire off a 'load data' command. It still doesn't feel like a good behavior though, even if the data was actually needed to load each time, it's only setting up a couple layouts.

[DanKyungu]

@PureWeen, can you have an alternative to avoid this lag because we must go in production and i need to know if there is something we can do until the issue to be resolved, if not we'll have to move to the default MasterDetail Navigation...

[Mikilll94]

@DanKyungu
It seems that there is no workaround. You need to go back to the old Master Detail page.

It's very sad that the Xamarin team is enjoyed with the Shell but with this bug, the Shell is really unusable because you cannot use the flyout.

[wagenheimer]

This bug is really annoying! I don't understand why something so critical seems to be ignored.

[samhouts]

We're definitely not ignoring it! We've marked this as one of our highest priority Shell issues to resolve in the near future. If we discover a workaround in the meantime, we will post it here. Thanks for your patience!

[Jason424242]

I have also noticed a similar looking stutter on the Google Play store and the Outlook app. Google Play store especially when I select "My Apps & games" off the menu. Outlook sometimes when I choose a new folder. I thought it may be an inherent Android problem when starting a network fetch while an animation is running.

I just tried some things out in the debugger and the animation does not begin until OnAppearing has completed. Maybe a way to kick off my async refresh after the animation completes would help.

[nhadro]

This ia a really big issue for us. We have to release in a month, any idea if something might be in place to fix this before then? I really don't want to go back to MasterDetail.

[tossingc]

I have a workaround - it's not pretty, but it stops the flyout jitter on close. My hope is that it sheds some light to the development team on a fix for this and get others a temporary workaround.

It looks like the problem is that there is too much going on in the main thread while the flyout close transition is trying to run. (Android DrawerLayout CloseDrawer() animation)

NOTE: this workaround addresses the Xamarin Forms logic for creating and setting the page blocking the UI thread, but any other app logic running on the UI thread will cause the same jittery "close drawer" animation. One way to mitigate this would be to listen for FlyoutIsPresented to become true and pause any update logic running from running on the UI thread until FlyoutIsPresented has been false for some period. (i.e. 1000ms)

In your subclass of Shell:

1. override OnPropertyChanged and store the last time the FlyoutIsPresented property was set to false
2. override OnNavigating and if the last time the FlyoutIsPresented property was set to false is less than some value (using 1000ms in the code below), then assume the Flyout was just hidden and perform the following:
3. cancel the navigation
4. set FlyoutIsPresented to false
5. raise OnPropertyChanged for the FlyoutIsPresented to trigger the ShellFlyoutRenderer to close the drawer
6. wait a brief period for the flyout to close
7. set a flag that we cancelled the navigation so we know to skip this check on the next call to OnNavigating
8. re-run the original navigation in the arguments passed to OnNavigating the first time

	public class AppShell : Shell
	{
		...
		
        private DateTime LastFlyoutHiddenUtcDateTime { get; set; }

        protected override void OnPropertyChanged(string propertyName = null)
        {
            base.OnPropertyChanged(propertyName);

            if (propertyName == nameof(FlyoutIsPresented))
            {
                if (!FlyoutIsPresented)
                {
                    LastFlyoutHiddenUtcDateTime = DateTime.UtcNow;
                }
            }
        }

        private bool WasNavigationCancelledToCloseFlyoutAndReRunAfterADelayToAvoidJitteryFlyoutCloseTransitionBug = false;

        protected override async void OnNavigating(ShellNavigatingEventArgs args)
        {
            if (!WasNavigationCancelledToCloseFlyoutAndReRunAfterADelayToAvoidJitteryFlyoutCloseTransitionBug)
            {
				// if the above value is true, then this is the re-run navigation from the GoToAsync(args.Target) call below - skip this block this second pass through, as the flyout is now closed
                if ((DateTime.UtcNow - LastFlyoutHiddenUtcDateTime).TotalMilliseconds < 1000)
                {
                    args.Cancel();

                    FlyoutIsPresented = false;

                    OnPropertyChanged(nameof(FlyoutIsPresented));

                    await Task.Delay(300);

                    WasNavigationCancelledToCloseFlyoutAndReRunAfterADelayToAvoidJitteryFlyoutCloseTransitionBug = true;

                    // re-run the originally requested navigation
                    await GoToAsync(args.Target);

                    return;
                }
            }

            WasNavigationCancelledToCloseFlyoutAndReRunAfterADelayToAvoidJitteryFlyoutCloseTransitionBug = false;

            base.OnNavigating(args);
		}
		
		...
	}

@nhadro @wagenheimer @Mikilll94 @DanKyungu @VirtualNomad00 @denzerd @lv1il0s @gnout

[whitedevils]

news about resolution? is very annoying this problem. :(

[JAdeloye]

Any update on this, has been here a while and really should be resolved?

[DanKyungu]

You can use LazyView to control the delay,
https://www.sharpnado.com/xamarin-forms-lazyview-boost-your-app-reactivity-and-startup-time/

[AndreasReitberger]

I'm still facing this issue. Anything new on this one? iOS is working fine, only Android is lagging behind...
Thanks!

[ghost]

Opened from one year !
Nice team from Microsoft 👍

[Nelo-cool]

Opened from one year !
Nice team from Microsoft 👍

Good boys! :) 🥇

[subhadrajain]

Please fix this.
I will lose my clients

[pictos]

@subhadrajain does this workaround doesn't work for you?#7521 (comment)

[holecekp]

I have tried the mentioned workaround and it did not work for me. It fixed the animation, but instead, it introduced a big lag before the new page was opened. So the overall user experience was equally bad :-(

[pictos]

@holecekp this one also? #7521 (comment)

Also, could you share a repro? I couldn't reproduce this issue locally in any Shell app that I made.

[subhadrajain]

@pictos 7 out of 10 times it is working fine.

[sparer]

I've produced this workaround which works sufficiently for my application. It just waits for the page to load before hiding the flyout. My app has a redirect when the app loads to request permissions if the app doesn't have them hence the 'redirected' bool. This was necessary because the flyout would show on a redirect even though the user hadn't clicked the hamburger icon. I can see that it might not work in some scenarios, such as long loading page, but as I said, for me it solves the problem sufficiently.

        private bool redirected;

        protected override void OnNavigating(ShellNavigatingEventArgs args)
        {
            if (Device.Android.Equals(Device.RuntimePlatform))
            {
                if (ShellNavigationSource.ShellSectionChanged.Equals(args.Source) && !redirected)
                {
                    FlyoutIsPresented = true;
                }
                redirected = true;
            }
            base.OnNavigating(args);
        }

        protected override void OnNavigated(ShellNavigatedEventArgs args)
        {
            if (Device.Android.Equals(Device.RuntimePlatform))
            {
                FlyoutIsPresented = false;
                redirected = false;
            }
            base.OnNavigated(args);
        }

[Jose-Develaw]

Hi, everyone:

I have modified a bit some code I saw here and I obtained a pretty good result. Try this:

protected async override void OnPropertyChanged([CallerMemberName] string propertyName = null)
        {
            base.OnPropertyChanged(propertyName);
            if (propertyName.Equals("CurrentItem") && Device.RuntimePlatform == Device.Android && this.CurrentState?.Location.OriginalString != "//loginPage")
            {
                FlyoutIsPresented = true;
                await Task.Delay(300);
                FlyoutIsPresented = false;
                
            }
          
        }

The <<this.CurrentState?.Location.OriginalString != "//loginPage">> thing is intended to avoid the flyout menu to appear the first time I log in.

Let me know it this works for you @subhadrajain @pictos @holecekp

[Reddyo]

Also hoping this gets an official fix.. I had to combine some of the solutions here to get something that worked for me. Primarily it is Jose-Develaw's solution just above, but adding the extra condition did not stop the flyout from opening on startup for me. I also did not like the idea of omitting the fix for certain pages, so I changed it like so to avoid it triggering at startup:

bool startUp = true;
protected override void OnNavigated(ShellNavigatedEventArgs args)
{
    base.OnNavigated(args);
    startUp = false;
}

protected async override void OnPropertyChanged([System.Runtime.CompilerServices.CallerMemberName] string propertyName = null)
{
    base.OnPropertyChanged(propertyName);
    if (!startUp && propertyName.Equals("CurrentItem") && Device.RuntimePlatform == Device.Android)
    {
        FlyoutIsPresented = true;
        await System.Threading.Tasks.Task.Delay(300);
        FlyoutIsPresented = false;
    }
}

OnNavigated() gets called after the initial calls to OnPropertyChanged() for "CurrentItem" so that is where the "startup" flag is updated to false.

[angelru]

The same problem here, it seems to also have to do with the bindings on the page being loaded. I put a delay before "refresh my view" and it just finishes closing the menu and doesn't freeze while animating.

[ghost]

Also hoping this gets an official fix.. I had to combine some of the solutions here to get something that worked for me. Primarily it is Jose-Develaw's solution just above, but adding the extra condition did not stop the flyout from opening on startup for me. I also did not like the idea of omitting the fix for certain pages, so I changed it like so to avoid it triggering at startup:

bool startUp = true;
protected override void OnNavigated(ShellNavigatedEventArgs args)
{
    base.OnNavigated(args);
    startUp = false;
}

protected async override void OnPropertyChanged([System.Runtime.CompilerServices.CallerMemberName] string propertyName = null)
{
    base.OnPropertyChanged(propertyName);
    if (!startUp && propertyName.Equals("CurrentItem") && Device.RuntimePlatform == Device.Android)
    {
        FlyoutIsPresented = true;
        await System.Threading.Tasks.Task.Delay(300);
        FlyoutIsPresented = false;
    }
}

OnNavigated() gets called after the initial calls to OnPropertyChanged() for "CurrentItem" so that is where the "startup" flag is updated to false.

Just tried this, It helped so much, No lagging and smooth transition.
Thank you very much

[AndreasReitberger]

@jsuarezruiz @hartez
Is this getting an official fix with SR5? This issue is almost open for two years..

[Nelo-cool]

@jsuarezruiz @hartez
Is this getting an official fix with SR5? This issue is almost open for two years..

There is a good saying among Russians. They have been waiting for the promised three years:)

[andersondamasio]

I also have this problem.
Any definitive solution?

[angelru]

Maybe in MAUI it is corrected.

[Darlingtone]

I seriously hope so Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>

…

________________________________ From: Ángel Rubén ***@***.***> Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2021 7:56:52 AM To: xamarin/Xamarin.Forms ***@***.***> Cc: Darlington ADIBE ***@***.***>; Manual ***@***.***> Subject: Re: [xamarin/Xamarin.Forms] Time lag before closing Shell flyout menu (#7521) Maybe in MAUI it is corrected. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#7521 (comment)>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAJM6HIYZW2AAKDCTJ7QV3DT6CNTJANCNFSM4IWX5FVA>. Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS<https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1477376905?ct=notification-email&mt=8&pt=524675> or Android<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.android&utm_campaign=notification-email>.

[PureWeen]

Maybe in MAUI it is corrected.

It should be a lot better right now in MAUI. One of the issues here is that on XF shell aggressively disposes and recreates renderers every time you move between tabs/flyout items. With MAUI we aren't doing that and as you move around the native stacks are all maintained.

If anyone is up for testing this out a bit on MAUI let me know your results.

[codebreakerlegend2019]

To be fair for the one that is still on XF this should be fixed. Just saying.

[NemesisXB]

Another 6 months has past and still not fixed?

[NeilWork]

All the fixes presented here merely delays the lag to another point or hides it behind the flyout menu. Is there not a way to preload pages and just present them to a detail page similar to what the MasterDetail page did

[supershopping]

Finally I found this long thread… I was having this issue on XF. Now I move on to MAUI, still the similar experience. Anyone has comments or solutions for MAUI performance?

[kdgilang]

Please fix this, I'm still facing the same issue on XS & MAUI.

[Hardikzinzala]

Please fix this, I'm still facing the same issue on MAUI.