How We Reduced Our Android Startup Time by 77%
Article Summary
Turo's Android team slashed their app startup time by 77%. Here's how they turned a sluggish launch into a lightning-fast experience.
The Turo Engineering team tackled one of mobile's toughest challenges: cold startup performance. Their approach combined eliminating blocking network calls, optimizing I/O operations, and leveraging Android's latest APIs to dramatically improve user experience.
Key Takeaways
- Removed blocking network requests during startup by deferring them asynchronously
- Eliminated custom SplashActivity and adopted Splash Screen API for better metrics
- Applied Baseline Profiles for 15% improvement in startup compilation
- Fixed SharedPreferences eager initialization causing disk reads on UI thread
- Ran 50/50 A/B test using local device hashing to measure impact
Critical Insight
By removing synchronous network calls, optimizing disk I/O, and applying Baseline Profiles, Turo reduced cold startup time by 77% on average (84% at p50).
