Significant delay launching app from Springboard

Question

When I tap my app icon to launch it, it takes 0.5-1.0 seconds after the tap before the app actually opens from the Springboard - in other words, there's a significant delay between tapping the icon and the Springboard zooming into the app's launch image. I'm not seeing this with any other apps on the device (iPad 3). This is also happening on the iPhone 4, but not the iPhone 5.

In addition to this happening on first launch, it also happens when the app is backgrounded.

I went through and made sure there wasn't anything expensive going on in applicationDidFinishLaunching or appBecameActive - I even tried deleting everything except assigning the view controller to the UIWindow's root view.

Has anyone ever seen anything like this before? Any ideas on how to fix it? Thanks!

Answer 1

If I read your statement

"significant delay between tapping the icon and...launch image"

then it's something that Springboard is dealing with. In other words, the delay is before your main() is called, so it's likely an issue with your app's static characteristics, either something declared in the info.plist or something with Springboard's ability to just load the app.

Some things I would check:

1. info.plist is well-formed and doesn't contain unnecessary references or other tags;
2. launch images are not crazy large;
3. the .ipa is not crazy large;
4. As xmlhack mentions, that you don't have something odd happening with static variables.