How to improve the startup time of an Android app?

Question

What is the recommended best practice for minimizing the startup time of an android application?

Answer 1

Start by understanding what makes it take so long to start up; then work to minimize that time.

That may sound flippant, but it's not. There's no one magic bullet for improving program performance. Database optimizations, threading, and other techniques may help, but no one could make a sound recommendation without knowing what makes it take a long time in your particular program.

In the case of Android apps, there are tools such as Traceview that can help you determine what your program is doing while it starts up.