Performance Optimization of iQIYI Android App Startup

iQIYI's Android app had a startup time of about 1.5 s, which was competitive but still a bottleneck. By forming a dedicated optimization team, the startup time was reduced to 0.5 s.

The initial strategy of delaying non‑essential tasks gave limited gains, and as the app grew, dependencies made simple delays ineffective.

The team built a custom tool called Lens, which integrates into any Android app as an SDK and provides task analysis, network capture, view inspection, sandbox access, and quick entry features.

Using Lens, they designed a task‑oriented framework (TaskManager) that supports task registration, execution conditions, dependency types (AND/OR), delayed execution, thread selection, data passing, and event listening.

The optimization measures included:

Taskization – encapsulating startup code into independent tasks.

Concurrency – executing independent tasks in parallel on background threads.

Delay – postponing non‑critical tasks until the first page is rendered.

Fallback – guaranteeing execution of dependent tasks via a fallback mechanism.

Monitoring & Optimization – establishing continuous monitoring of task performance and blocking waits.

After refactoring, the startup time fell below 500 ms, the number of active threads during startup decreased significantly, and the Lens and TaskManager tools proved essential.

Additional practices such as code‑execution efficiency improvements and pre‑loading of critical data were also applied.