The one useful thing to do app performance automation is dumpsys
that is described in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfo5fdoXrTU
Also there is a nice log output for the app start time, this is a quote from the docs:
From Android 4.4 (API level 19), logcat includes an output line containing a value called Displayed. This value represents the amount of time elapsed between launching the process and finishing drawing the corresponding activity on the screen. The elapsed time encompasses the following sequence of events:
Launch the process. Initialize the objects. Create and initialize the activity. Inflate the layout. Draw your application for the first time. The reported log line looks similar to the following example:
ActivityManager: Displayed com.android.myexample/.StartupTiming: +3s534ms