there's just this vague recommendation to "turn it off in settings." no link, no toggle, nothing.
had to hunt for the relevant setting in the app(even their settings menu is down under in the list when you tap on your avatar.
image transcription:
a screenshot of Google play store which has a popup that can only be disabled by pressing OK button at the bottom.
the popup contains the following text:
Google is optimising app installs with your help
Google Play makes apps faster to install, open and run based on what people are using most.
The first time that you open an app after installing, Google notes which parts of the app you use. When enough people do this, your apps will install faster.
App install optimisation is automatically turned on, but you can turn it off in settings. Learn more
I knew it had something to do with art but didn't know you could pre-compile only certain segments. I thought the best you could do was to have a bundle for certain architecture (split apks). thanks for the explanation!
now I have another question:
can't Google just get that data by running the app itself (which it does anyway) on the servers? or do they trust real hardware more than emulators?
Google cannot do this because the code that matters to performance depends on all the inputs which includes the user's actual behavior. For example, I could write an app that contains a big feature that users overwhelmingly care nothing about, wasting time in compiling it and resources in storing the translated code for this unused feature.
Building on the server means giving up access to user behavior, which is important to what code really runs. It's tough to strike a good balance between not storing code that won't be used, install times, and runtime performance.