Let me know if the situation improves with 1.8.8. We have made the change to something else and perhaps it will affect the people experiencing this issue on Samsung.
Something changed in the last 2 weeks on my phone that made the app load much faster. It was not the 1.8.8 update, though, as it also loads much faster on 1.6.7. There was a system update (Samsung S23) and I tried disabling battery optimization, but I enabled it again and the app still loaded faster. Has anyone else experienced this?