Startup Improvements in Xamarin.Forms on Android

by Miguel de Icaza

With Xamarin.Forms 3.0 in addition to the many new feature work that we did, we have been doing some general optimizations across the board, from compile times to startup times and wanted to share some recent results on the net effect on one of our larger sample apps.

These are the results when doing a cold start for the SmartHotel360 application on Android when compiled for 32bits (armeabi-v7a) on a Google Pixel (1st gen).

Release Release/AOT Release/AOT+LLVM
Forms 2.5.0 6.59s 1.66s 1.61s
Forms 3.0.0 3.52s 1.41s 1.38s

This is independent of the work that we are doing to improve Android's startup speed, that both brings additional benefits today, and will bring additional benefits in the future.

One of the areas that we are investing on for Android is to remove any dynamic code execution at startup to integrate with the Java runtime, instead all of this is being statically computed, similar to what we are doing on Mac and iOS where we completely eliminated reflection and code generation from startup.

Posted on 18 May 2018