Android Developers: Trace me if you can: Automated instrumentation and field profiling

Optimizing Android apps requires deep visibility into concurrent workflows and coroutine suspensions.

While local profiling offers a useful snapshot, scaling these insights to production without overhead remains a challenge.



This session delivers an architectural blueprint for a continuous performance feedback loop.



androidx.tracing 2.0: Swap backends dynamically and propagate coroutine contexts (Perfetto flows) across threads.



Smart Instrumentation: Use local ART tracing to find hotspots, then automate the injection of low-overhead trace points.



Macrobenchmarking: Track regressions and verify performance gains on physical devices in CI.



Field Tracing: Go beyond local and CI tracing, with ProfilingManager.



Speakers: Rahul Ravikumar



Chapters:

0:00 - Introduction & evolution of Android tracing

6:15 - Overview of tracing 2.0 & performance

10:33 - Context propagation, coroutines & Jetpack Compose

18:42 - Global tracing & custom initialization

21:18 - Build tool optimizations (R8 & metalava)

24:53 - Tracing best practices & benchmarking

27:05 - Setup, summary & conclusion



Watch the tools & performance sessions from Android Dev Summit 2026 → https://goo.gle/ADS26-Tools-and-Perf

Watch all the sessions from Android Dev Summit 2026 → https://goo.gle/ADS26-All-Sessions





Subscribe to Android Developers → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs





#AndroidDevSummit2026





Event: Android Dev Summit 2026



Products Mentioned: androidx.tracing 2.0, Perfetto, ART Tracing, ProfilingManager, Android Performance