Android cold startup vs. hot startup concepts

Cold start

What is cold start

In Android, cold start is, in plain English:

• When the phone is rebooted, tapping the desktop icon to launch the app is a cold start
• If the phone is not started or not used for a long time, click the desktop icon to start the application after the application is killed

Form of cold start

An unprocessed condition

• There’s no response when you click on the desktop icon. There’s no instant app opening, which means you don’t see the app opening right away
• Clicking on the desktop icon shows a black or white screen without rendering the page elements in time

Warm start

What is hot start

• When start the application, the background for the application of the process (example: press the back button, home button, the application will exit, but the application process is still stays in the background, can enter a task list for), so in the case of existing process, this can from existing in the process to start the application, this way is called hot start.

The manifestation of hot start

• Hot start is very fast to enter app, because it will be started from the existing process, so hot start will not go through the Application step, but directly through the MainActivity (including a series of measurement, layout, drawing), so the process of hot start only need to create and initialize a MainActivity. You don’t have to create and initialize the Application.