UIActivityViewController taking long time to present - ios

Question

I made an app for iPhone. Now, I'm recreating it for iPad.
When the user selects the action button in the toolbar, a popover should show with a UIActivityViewController, but for some reason, it's taking about 10 seconds for it to show the first time. On iPhone, it takes about a second. It's the same code except for the popover.
I tried disabling the popover, but it still takes around 10 seconds to show.
Here is the code:
-(IBAction)Actions:(UIBarButtonItem*)sender
{
if ([activityPopover isPopoverVisible] == YES)
{
[activityPopover dismissPopoverAnimated:YES];
return;
}
UIWebView *currentWebView = ((TabView *)self.tabs[self.currentTabIndex]).webViewObject;
NSString *currentURL = (NSString*)[currentWebView request].mainDocumentURL;
if (currentURL == NULL) return;
BookmarkActivity *bookmarkActivity = [[BookmarkActivity alloc] init];
UIActivityViewController *sharing = [[UIActivityViewController alloc] initWithActivityItems:[NSArray arrayWithObject:currentURL] applicationActivities:#[bookmarkActivity]];
activityPopover = [[UIPopoverController alloc] initWithContentViewController:sharing];
[activityPopover presentPopoverFromBarButtonItem:sender permittedArrowDirections:UIPopoverArrowDirectionUp animated:YES];
}
I have tested on my iPad 3 and my iPad mini, both take awhile to present this.
How can I solve the problem?

Answer 1

Good question, I just had the same problem. It is not really solvable. However, you may improve the user experience by creating an activity indicator and then sending the initialization of the UIActivityViewController to the background:
-(void)openIn:(id)sender
{
// start activity indicator
[self.activityIndicator startAnimating];
// create new dispatch queue in background
dispatch_queue_t queue = dispatch_queue_create("openActivityIndicatorQueue", NULL);
// send initialization of UIActivityViewController in background
dispatch_async(queue, ^{
NSArray *dataToShare = #[#"MyData"];
UIActivityViewController *activityViewController = [[UIActivityViewController alloc] initWithActivityItems:dataToShare applicationActivities:nil];
// when UIActivityViewController is finally initialized,
// hide indicator and present it on main thread
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
[self.activityIndicator stopAnimating];
[self presentViewController:activityViewController animated:YES completion:nil];
});
});
}
It works like a charm. When the user touches the button, the activity indicator starts animating, thus indicating that the process will take a while.

Answer 2

I was having the same issue on iOS 7. When I removed UIActivityTypeAirDrop from the allowed activity types, however, the controller appears almost instantly.

Answer 3

Although these calls are already from the main thread, since iOS 7, wrapping some of those presentation calls in a dispatch block seems to greatly reduce the delay
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
[self presentViewController:activityViewController animated:YES completion:nil];
});

Answer 4

Had this issue myself recently. Would sometimes take nearly 4 or 5 seconds to pop up, which is a lifetime! Only the first time though. Subsequent calls were quick.
Also had a similar issue a couple of years back with the keyboard appearing slowly and someone produced a few lines of code added to the appdelegate that preloads the keyboard to get around that.
I used a similar approach here to preload the UIActivityViewController by placing this in the AppDelegate on startup. It's absolutely a hack which shouldn't be necessary but I couldn't find any other options.
let lagfreeAVC:UIActivityViewController = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: ["start"], applicationActivities: nil)
lagfreeAVC.becomeFirstResponder()
lagfreeAVC.resignFirstResponder()