From Snail to Sonic: How Baseline Profiles Supercharged Meetup's Android App
Article Summary
Meetup cut their Android app startup time by 36% without writing much code. Here's how a simple Google technology delivered massive performance gains.
Colin Lee from Meetup's engineering team implemented baseline profiles, a Google technology that pre-compiles Java Virtual Machine functions. The result? Cold app startup dropped from 970ms to 620ms on a Pixel 3.
Key Takeaways
- Baseline profiles reduced cold startup time from 970ms to 620ms (36% faster)
- Previous refactoring efforts only achieved 10% performance improvements
- Technology pre-compiles JVM functions before they're needed
- Team plans A/B testing to measure business metric impact
Meetup achieved a 36% reduction in Android app startup time using baseline profiles, a rare easy performance win that creates smoother first impressions for new users.
Continue reading
Grab
Oct 19, 2026
More from Meetup
How Meetup Scales Notification Queue Consumers
Meetup
Oct 18, 2022
Also on Android
How a Kotlin compiler plugin cut Android time to first render by 30%
Expo
Jun 10, 2026
What This Article Covers
Meetup noticed that their app was slow to start up, which made a bad first impression on users and hurt both conversion and retention rates.
Colin Lee used baseline profiles, a Google technology from I/O 2022 that lets the JVM pre-compile functions ahead of time. The change required minimal updates to the codebase.
Cold startup performance improved by 36%. That's significantly better than the typical 10% gains companies see from major refactoring work.
This page summarizes “From Snail to Sonic: How Baseline Profiles Supercharged Meetup's Android App” by Meetup, published Mar 14, 2023. All credit for the original work goes to the authors.
