The native app version of the app generally fares better, even we still have some improvements to make here (the new Android 13 JNI improvements are likely to help us a lot).
Edit: I reloaded right after posting the above, and the gallery loaded immediately as a result. Something's wrong with the loader.
I doubt there's anything you can do. It will probably work fine for corporate intranet sites and back office apps with some aggressive caching.