Smartphone application launch with smarter scheduling

The time it takes to launch a smartphone application is unpredictable. In this paper, we explore how these unpredictable launch times are affected by constraints associated with reading (writing) from (to) flash storage. We conduct the first large-scale measurement study on the Android I/O delay using the data collected from our Android application running on 1480 devices within 188 days. Among others, we observe that reads experience up to 626% slowdown when blocked by concurrent writes. We use this obtained knowledge to design a pilot solution, wherein by prioritizing reads over writes we are able to reduce the launch delay by up to 37.8%.