It increase performance in Unity min x2 on mobile in compare with using regular sprites for that. This happens cause I don’t use alpha and meshes holds much less memory.
Have you made performance measurements in Defold? You shouldn’t assume that a problem in one tool automatically translates to another.
You mention gui, and for that we have box and text nodes (and some others). Box nodes can either have a texture or only a color. But you also mention sprites which exist in Defold as game object components so I’m not sure what you actually want to do.
No, I didn’t, but an alpha in textures and a filrate cause by textures is a common problem on mobile devices. And it’s not depends on game engine. Any way textures takes more memory than meshes (a spatially an old version of Android, because it not support alpha in textures, so each texture with alpha create new one to store alpha in it)
The idea is use complex mesh painted by only vertex color instead of using box mesh with texture (with alpha).