What is app startup time? Cold start vs warm start
Blog post from Expo
App startup time varies by launch state and measurement endpoint, so cold, warm, and hot launches must be distinguished and first-frame metrics should not be confused with the time until a screen is genuinely usable. Android measures time to initial display and optionally time to full display, while Apple generally measures from icon tap to first frame; tools such as Firebase, Xcode Organizer, MetricKit, Macrobenchmark, Sentry, and Expo may use different start and stop points. Production monitoring should pair first-frame data with a product-specific “ready” or time-to-interactive marker set only after essential content and controls are available, while separately tracking crashes, hangs, failures, and timeouts that may otherwise disappear from latency percentiles. Meaningful release comparisons require release builds, segmentation by device, operating system, launch state, and entry path, plus percentile counts and trace-level investigation. Performance improvements should focus on work on the critical path, defer unnecessary initialization and data loading, reduce framework, native module, and JavaScript bundle costs where relevant, and remeasure both visual and usable startup after changes. Expo’s EAS Observe provides production startup metrics for supported React Native apps, but its definitions differ from platform-native metrics, reinforcing that teams must define their own usability budget and document exactly what their dashboards measure.
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