Baseline profiles do not help native code, but their siblings do

Baseline profiles tell the Android runtime which classes to compile ahead of time. A game whose Java layer is a thin wrapper around NativeActivity will see almost no benefit, because there is almost nothing to compile.

The native equivalent is the set of decisions your engine makes during the first second: which pipelines to create, which textures to upload, which level data to parse. Recording that work and replaying it from a precomputed plan is the same idea applied one layer down, and it is where the start-up seconds actually go.

We measured a 1.9 second cold start on a mid-range phone. Of that, 0.3 seconds was runtime and Java initialisation, 1.1 seconds was texture upload, and 0.5 seconds was pipeline creation. A baseline profile can only touch the first number.