VO takes a solid 60s to load from the launcher to the log-in menu in the game, not including the time it takes to update and verify files. That kinda sucks when the game gets background killed by the OS when I switch to look at a SMS or Email. This is on my Motorola Photon Q, which isn't a particularly "old" phone.

Does anyone have any tips for shortening this time? I'm guessing this is probably limited by the read speed of the device's eMMC chip.

Drop down your notification bar and start VO from there. It won't check the files then

Yeah, I knew about that, which is why I didn't include the time it takes to run the updater. I'm talking about how to speed up the game's load time from that point to the login screen.

I use a Droid app killer myself. I have it set to aggressive kill mode and only leave the OS and VO safe from being 'killed'. Also make sure that no apps are set for auto update as they will attempt to do so regardless of the app killer. Doing these also help to keep your resources and bandwidth free for the game.

Sorry, for the hijack, but App killers can actually hurt your battery life, especially if they're set to aggressive.

I only use the app killer on aggressive when playing VO. Wasn't aware of battery issues using one as I usually have my tablet plugged in during play to avoid battery drained disconnect. Thank you for the info I'll have to kept it in mind when I'm not playing.

I did figure out a way to cut down load times: Turn the texture quality down to Very Low. The game looks like bilinear-filtered ass, but it does load quicker.

Reducing texture quality will also make the memory footprint smaller, and make it less likely for the OS to kill the game in the background. It may not be necessary to turn everything down to the minimum.

But, if you're seeing background kills on a device with 1GB of ram, that's pretty unusual to begin with. Something is being pretty aggressive. Like maybe you have some other app that's using up memory? I can background Vendetta on any of our 1GB devices and come back a day later and still have it running (and connected). Of course, not if I use a lot of intense games and saturate ram.. but general phone-type usage, it stays backgrounded. I did this on my Atrix 4G (1GB phone) many times.

I would consider turning off things like smart-wallpaper with 3D effects. Also if you have a whole lot of browser tabs open, that could be a problem. Anything that might allocate a lot of ram.

Yeah, it's usually the Browser, E-mail, Google Maps, or Hangouts that does it. I'm not using any of that Live Wallpaper nonsense or similar wasteful eye-candy.

Cutting texture quality down helped a lot, but it still gets background killed from time to time.