Using the Ionic's ion-img directive for improving performance with images
Using Ionic's infinite scroll for long lists
Looking at optimising change detection all over the place, using OnPush more and removing reliance of expensive observables being unnecessarily resubscribed to by the async pipe etc.
Caching data locally with Ionic Storage - https://ionicframework.com/docs/storage/ - chats would be a very good candidate for this, then managing updates to the local storage by querying with the objectId of the last message and then returning all messages from that ID