iOS Smooth Infinite Scroll

When implementing infinite scroll, you want to fetch more data before user reaches the end of a list and also update the display to show the new cells. In iOS there are different Run Loop Modes which will affect the resulting user experience. NSDefaultRunLoopMode is the default mode for most operations. However, this run loop mode doesn’t allow operations to execute while user is interacting with the application. On the other hand NSRunLoopCommonModes allows operations to execute while user interaction is happening. The problem with using NSRunLoopCommonModes in infinite scroll is the same as problems in dealing with event loops. If you perform operation that takes a while in event loops then other events won’t be process until the first operation is done. What this means for user interaction is that user will sense unresponsiveness in the UI if there are long running operations. The way to solve that is the same as event loops.

When dealing with event loops in the main thread, you typically will delegate long running operations to a separate thread so that messages don’t stop getting processed. I have found that when trying to implement infinite scroll, you should use NSRunLoopCommonModes but make sure to only do small updates each time to ensure user interaction remains responsive. For my application, performing small updates such as adding one more cell to UITableView is sufficient to ensure user interaction doesn’t get interrupted. Once you get the event that user interaction and animation have stopped, then a complete update to flush every pending update can be done. Doing small update plus complete update when interaction is done allows you to implement very smooth infinite scroll that doesn’t ever show spinners if the network and your server can keep up providing data. i.e. It’s a true infinite scroll.