See the wait your startup chart is hiding

Your Play Console startup chart looks healthy. Meanwhile a player taps your icon, watches the logo, and waits for the game to load. Google Play measures start-up time as the moment the first frame appears, and a splash screen counts as that frame. One line of code tells you when the player can actually play.

THE HIT

Measure the moment the player can act. Android reports two numbers. Time to initial display (TTID) is the first frame of your UI, reported automatically for every app by the framework. Time to full display (TTFD) covers that first frame plus the content that loads asynchronously after it, which is the number that answers when your game is usable. Android's docs are explicit that the system cannot work this out alone, so your app has to signal it.
Source: Android Developers, App startup time

Get the real number with one line. Call reportFullyDrawn() after you have completely drawn the UI and all of the data, then cold start the app and compare two Logcat lines: Displayed for TTID and Fully drawn for TTFD. The gap between them is the wait your chart never showed you. Call it too early and the system reports both values as TTID, so when background work has to finish first, delay the call with FullyDrawnReporter, or ReportDrawnWhen in Compose.
Source: Android Developers, Measuring time to full display

Spend the sprint where the gap is, then prove the win. Google Play flags a cold start of five seconds or more as slow, and a fast first frame can still hide a longer wait behind it. Faster time-to-play is a reasonable hypothesis for better Day 7 retention rather than a proven lift, so fix the startup path first and test a meaningful change against a control.
Source: Google Play Console Help, Android vitals: start-up time

DO THIS TODAY (10 minutes)

Nobody downloaded your app to watch the logo.

See you Tuesday,
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