feat: Disable Blockies icons by default (for performance improvements)

[owencraston]

Description

We noticed during our testing that Blockies account icons take much longer to calculate than equivalent Jazzicons. This change is quite simple, it simply set the default icon type to be jazzicon vs blockies. This is done by setting the deafult value of useBlockieIcon to false. The result is...

• ~49% decrease in the time to render of the account list

((3.96-2.06)/3.86)*100 = 49.2227979275

This was tested on my Google Pixel 6 in debug mode. I had 18 accounts including one Solana account with balances.

Related issues

Fixes: https://github.com/MetaMask/accounts-planning/issues/919

Manual testing steps

1. Create a fresh install of the wallet. See the mobile readme for details on how to run the app on your device. I would recommend using a slower android device since the differences are more apparent.
2. Ensure you are building beta by changing METAMASK_BUILD_TYPE to be beta in your .js.env
3. yarn setup && yarn watch:clean
4. create/import a wallet
5. once onboarded, create a solana account via the prompt on the home page or by clicking on the account list, add new account, solana.
6. close and reopen the account list, notice that all the icons are Jazzicons

7. The account list should render slightly faster than it did with blockies
8. go to settings, general and then set your icons to be blockies
9. navigate back to the home page and open the account selector again
10. the icons should now be blockies icons

11. the account list should appear slightly slower to render.

Screenshots/Recordings

Before

After

Confirmed that changing your icons back to blockies works as expected.

screen-20250425-134435.mp4

Pre-merge author checklist

• I’ve followed MetaMask Contributor Docs and MetaMask Mobile Coding Standards.
• I've completed the PR template to the best of my ability
• I’ve included tests if applicable
• I’ve documented my code using JSDoc format if applicable
• I’ve applied the right labels on the PR (see labeling guidelines). Not required for external contributors.

Pre-merge reviewer checklist

• I've manually tested the PR (e.g. pull and build branch, run the app, test code being changed).
• I confirm that this PR addresses all acceptance criteria described in the ticket it closes and includes the necessary testing evidence such as recordings and or screenshots.

[github-actions]

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[github-actions]

Bitrise

✅✅✅ pr_smoke_e2e_pipeline passed on Bitrise! ✅✅✅

Commit hash: 2e16bd7
Build link: https://app.bitrise.io/app/be69d4368ee7e86d/pipelines/485f59be-8e72-449b-8041-ed18aacbe117

Note

• You can kick off another pr_smoke_e2e_pipeline on Bitrise by removing and re-applying the Run Smoke E2E label on the pull request

[vinnyhoward]

Amazing optimizations lately

[owencraston]

@vinnyhoward did you test yourself? I have been getting mixed results and so has @gantunesr ?

[hesterbruikman]

Thank you @owencraston ! Can you confirm that the default setting only affects new users? In spite of the performance improvement (totally understand and agree this is a critical focus area), I want to make sure we don't change the avatar for existing users in one release, and then again two releases later. We're introducing a new avatar altogether.

Any performance gain for new users is a no-brainer, but for existing users I want to make sure we don't change their avatars twice.

[owencraston]

@hesterbruikman two things...

1. we have paused this work since we were not able to determine if it made a meaningful difference in performance.
2. this would only effect new users, existing users will have their setting of blockies persisted across updates.

[hesterbruikman]

Understood, ty @owencraston !