Android Developers Blog: How a single Android developer improved Lyft’s Drivers app startup time by 21% in one month
Article Summary
One Android developer at Lyft cut app startup time by 21% in just 30 days. Here's how they convinced leadership to prioritize performance over features.
Lyft's Driver app was launching 15-20% slower than competitors. The team used Android vitals data to diagnose the bottleneck, build a business case, and scope a focused one-month sprint to fix it.
Key Takeaways
- Android vitals provided competitive benchmarking data to justify the investment
- Profiling revealed bootstrap network calls were the critical bottleneck
- Removing blocking calls and caching data delivered 21% faster startup
- Results drove 5% more driver sessions and created ongoing performance workstream
Strategic use of Android vitals turned a single developer's month into measurable business impact and organizational buy-in for app quality.
About This Article
Lyft's Driver app took four stages to start up: process initialization, rendering the activity UI, making bootstrap network requests, and finally displaying the app. The bootstrap phase turned out to be the slowest part, which held back how quickly users could actually interact with the app.
The team broke down the backend services to cut unnecessary network calls during startup. They made the remaining calls run asynchronously, pushed blocking calls to run in the background, and added data caching so information persisted between sessions.
The startup time improved by 21%. This success led leadership to create a dedicated mobile performance team and bring on more engineers to keep investing in app quality.
