Accelerating our Android apps with Baseline Profiles
Article Summary
Meta just shipped a masterclass in Android performance optimization. Their apps now load up to 40% faster thanks to one underutilized Android feature.
Meta's engineering team reveals how they leveraged Android's Baseline Profiles across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger to dramatically improve performance. With billions of users and apps loading 20,000+ classes at startup, they needed a solution that could adapt to thousands of daily code commits.
Key Takeaways
- Performance improvements ranging from 3% to 40% across critical metrics
- Custom ClassLoader logs user behavior to generate profiles from real production data
- Started conservative at 80-90% thresholds, now include classes appearing in just 20% of traces
- Profiles contain tens of thousands of entries optimizing startup, scrolling, and navigation
- Combines benchmarks, user telemetry, and profgen tool for continuous experimentation
Critical Insight
Meta achieved up to 40% performance gains across their Android apps by creating data-driven Baseline Profiles from real user behavior instead of relying on Google's Cloud Profiles alone.
