App Designer refresh rate of UI elements is too low. Any way to boost it?

I have an app designer application which - amongst other things - receives data via serial connection. To display the data, I use linear gauges, although the issue arises in all app designer ui elements. The code below demonstrates the issue. A timer changes the value of the LinearGauge every ~20 ms, however it is effectively updated with a refresh rate just slightly above 1 Hz. That is certainly way too low for my application.

I tested this with two different Windows 7 machines and R2016b. The task manager doesn't show any high load. So I assume this is hard capped somewhere.

My question: Is this resolved in R2017a? If not, can I do something about it? The App Designer is really great and fun to work with, but the slow UI elements are a serious bummer.

Thanks in advance!

Here's testapp.mlapp to demonstrate the issue:

classdef testapp < matlab.apps.AppBase

% Properties that correspond to app components
properties (Access = public)
  UIFigure    matlab.ui.Figure
  GaugeLabel  matlab.ui.control.Label
  Gauge       matlab.ui.control.SemicircularGauge
end

properties (Access = private)
  tim_the_timer
  i = 0;
end

methods (Access = private)
  function app = refreshMeter(app, ~,~)
      % display timestamp
      datestr(now,'HH:MM:SS.FFF')

        % update the gauge
        app.Gauge.Value = app.i;
        app.i = app.i + 1;
        if app.i > 100
           app.i = 0;
        end
    end
end

methods (Access = private)

    % Code that executes after component creation
    function startupFcn(app)
       t = timer;
       t.TimerFcn = @app.refreshMeter;
       t.Period = 0.02;
       t.BusyMode = 'drop';
       t.ExecutionMode = 'fixedRate';
       start(t);
       app.tim_the_timer = t;
    end

    % Close request function: UIFigure
    function UIFigureCloseRequest(app, event)
        stop(app.tim_the_timer);
        delete(app.tim_the_timer);
        delete(app);
    end
end

% App initialization and construction
methods (Access = private)

    % Create UIFigure and components
    function createComponents(app)

        % Create UIFigure
        app.UIFigure = uifigure;
        app.UIFigure.Position = [100 100 640 480];
        app.UIFigure.Name = 'UI Figure';
        app.UIFigure.CloseRequestFcn = createCallbackFcn(app, @UIFigureCloseRequest, true);
        setAutoResize(app, app.UIFigure, true)

        % Create GaugeLabel
        app.GaugeLabel = uilabel(app.UIFigure);
        app.GaugeLabel.HorizontalAlignment = 'center';
        app.GaugeLabel.Position = [307 252 42 15];
        app.GaugeLabel.Text = 'Gauge';

        % Create Gauge
        app.Gauge = uigauge(app.UIFigure, 'semicircular');
        app.Gauge.Position = [268 282 120 65];
    end
end

methods (Access = public)

    % Construct app
    function app = testapp()

        % Create and configure components
        createComponents(app)

        % Register the app with App Designer
        registerApp(app, app.UIFigure)

        % Execute the startup function
        runStartupFcn(app, @startupFcn)

        if nargout == 0
            clear app
        end
    end

    % Code that executes before app deletion
    function delete(app)

        % Delete UIFigure when app is deleted
        delete(app.UIFigure)
    end
end
end