Version 8 of the Studentencodex app is out, right in time for the start of the new academic year later this month. Studentencodex contains all of Flanders’ student songs, with a powerful search and the ability to favorite songs so you can quickly find the lyrics and music sheets you need at any cantus.
Unlike previous releases, this one doesn’t add any new features. Instead, it’s entirely focused on making the app feel faster by adding a ‘baseline profile’ and a ‘startup profile’.
What are baseline and startup profiles?
Normally, Android’s runtime (ART) only optimizes your app’s code after it has been run a few times, compiling the “hot” parts just-in-time as it learns which code paths matter most. A baseline profile tells ART in advance which classes and methods are critical to your app’s performance, so it can be compiled ahead of time instead of interpreted or JIT-compiled during those first few runs.
A startup profile goes one step further and tells the build system which classes are needed specifically during app startup. This allows those classes to be laid out more efficiently in the app’s compiled code, which speeds up class loading right when the app launches.
Together, both profiles let the app start faster from the very first launch, without users having to “warm up” the app first.
The results
I measured the impact using Macrobenchmark on a Pixel 10. With the baseline and startup profiles in place, the median cold-start time dropped by about 17.5 ms, roughly an 8.9% improvement.
The Play Store Console confirms the app is now highly optimized, building on the R8 code shrinking that previous versions already used:
This also means the app is ready for the new “performance thresholds” that the Play Store will start enforcing in 2027, as announced by Google.
You can install the latest version of the Studentencodex app from the Play Store.