Opinion: We Ditched All Third-Party Mobile SDKs – Cut App Startup Time by 30% for iOS 18 When iOS 18 launched, our team braced for the usual post-release performance tweaks. Instead, we hit a wall: our flagship app’s cold startup time had crept up to 2.8 seconds, well above Apple’s recommended 1.5-second threshold for optimal user retention. After months of debugging, we made a radical call: remove every single third-party mobile SDK from our codebase. The result? A 30% reduction in startup time, dropping to 1.9 seconds, with no loss of core functionality. The SDK Bloat Problem Like most mature apps, ours had accumulated 27 third-party SDKs over four years: analytics tools, ad networks, crash reporters, social login providers, payment gateways, and niche utility libraries. Each promised "easy integration" and "minimal overhead," but we never audited their cumulative impact.…