Can you add a license and release Android version of the app?
Is your app doing a get request on each story that shows on the page to pull in the page images and other assets ?
Octal on ios does the exact same thing and I’ve always wondered the same. I guess you could have a server side component where you pass the url, gets the thumbnail from metadata and caches it but not sure what it actually does.
sadly yes, I don’t have much backend experience but definitely will explore other options in the future when possible.