How We Enhanced Our Android App’s Startup Time by Over 50%
Article Summary
Back Market slashed their Android app startup time by 60%. Here's the engineering breakdown that made it happen.
Florian Le Ficher from Back Market's engineering team shares the multi-month journey to dramatically improve their app's cold start performance. They used Android Vitals, Firebase, and Datadog to measure impact, then systematically tackled the biggest bottlenecks.
Key Takeaways
- Deferring SDK initialization cut startup time by 35% alone
- App startup profiles reduced load time by 15% with simple implementation
- Feature flag SDK was doing disk I/O on main thread, adding 150ms delay
- Baseline profiles and moving operations to IO threads delivered major wins
- Android Vitals showed slow cold starts dropped from 5% to 2% of sessions
Critical Insight
By deferring SDK initialization, eliminating main thread I/O, and implementing baseline profiles, Back Market reduced their P90 cold start from 1.5s to under 0.6s.
