How We Improved Our Android Apps Performance by Up to 24%
Article Summary
Mercado Libre's Android team achieved a 24% performance boost without using Google's recommended Baseline Profiles or Macrobenchmark tools. How did they pull it off?
The performance engineering team at Mercado Libre (Latin America's largest e-commerce platform) tackled cold startup times for their Mercado Pago and Mercado Libre apps. With 19% of users on low-end devices, they needed creative solutions that didn't rely on the latest Android tooling.
Key Takeaways
- Reduced excessive list iterations and removed non-critical startup configurations
- Optimized coroutine usage: single scope proved 9% faster than parallel launches
- Implemented custom thread pool with max priority for startup tasks
- Postponed analytics tracking by 5 seconds to free up resources
- Results: 1.5M daily users now start apps under 5 seconds
Critical Insight
By refactoring their startup algorithm across five key areas, Mercado Libre improved cold startup by up to 24% and cut non-compliant sessions in half.
