From Snail to Sonic: How Baseline Profiles Supercharged Meetup’s Android App
As consumers, we’ve all been there — you download a new app, launch it for the first time, and are frustrated by how long it takes to start up. If an app is sluggish at first launch, it leaves a bad first impression that’s hard to overcome.
At Meetup, we realized having slower apps was likely costing us users and revenue. So we implemented a simple change that cut our app’s startup time by 36%, delivering a smoother experience that helps us to convert and retain users. And — we did it without even writing much code.
Here’s how we did it. Google recently introduced a technology called baseline profiles that optimizes Android apps for faster launch times. It allows the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to pre-compile functions so they’re ready before they’re needed. As soon as it was announced at Google I/O 2022, I began adding baseline profiles to Meetup’s Android apps.
Recently, I conducted a benchmark test to measure the impact. The results were astounding. We integrated baseline profiles into our main Meetup Android app and saw best case cold app startup times on a Pixel 3 drop from 970ms to 620ms — a 36% improvement.
For app performance, a 36% improvement is remarkable. On a large refactoring initiative at a previous company, we were only able to achieve a 10% improvement in performance. Easy performance wins like baseline profiles don’t come across your desk every day.
For a more detailed understanding of baseline profiles, I recommend watching the Google video below.
The takeaway for any mobile app business is clear. Your app startup experience shapes lasting first impressions. Is your app fast and friction-less or sluggish and buggy? Investing in performance optimizations like baseline profiles can deliver a big competitive advantage by creating smoother first-time user experiences. The result is higher conversion, retention, and revenue.
Although a 36% reduction in startup time is significant for app performance, it makes a better business case to show how it has improved our business metrics. Anecdotally, people know faster apps tend to be more successful. However, business leaders need to know how much value they should associate with our app’s performance wins.
Based on our results, I cannot say that cold app startup was the best choice to lift our metrics. Our app startup was already quite fast compared to our competitors and it was not a problem area. But it was the easiest first step to get our feet wet with baseline profiles.
In upcoming entries of this blog post series, I will examine other app performance improvements for the Meetup app. I will add baseline profiles to other screens. I will also cover what it takes to perform an A/B test of baseline profiles to show a lift in business metrics.
