I think this speaks to something really important that's rarely touched on directly; people hate waiting for software. I despise it. Many ordinary consumers use their phones as a way to solve "waiting" in general (just look what happens when you have a bunch of people in line: they take out their phones to pass the time).

To date, the way most developers solve this (Aside from optimizing for performance where possible) is to use loading indicators of some kind, but that's a bandaid at best. Some work will definitely have to be done to manage the battery drain concerns that can arise from this, but more time spent in your app actually doing stuff, and less time waiting for the app to update will be a huge gift of time back to users (basically 2 - 5 seconds every time you open an app is about to be given back to you). Add that up over many app opens every day over many days every year; its substantial.