The situation

You are a senior mobile engineer on a React Native team that ships a consumer‑facing app with Expo SDK 50 and expo‑router 2.0.0.

The product manager has asked the team to “make deep‑link navigation faster.” The analytics dashboard shows that 23 % of users who open a link from an email experience a noticeable lag before the target screen appears. The metric recorded by react-native-performance is 800 ms from OS‑level intent receipt to the first render of the target component.

Because the app’s cold‑start budget is 1 s on low‑end Android devices, this deep‑link delay is eating ~30 % of the total launch time , leading to higher bounce rates and a spike in support tickets that cost the team an estimated $12 k per month in lost conversions and engineering time spent triaging complaints.

The documentation for expo‑router explains how to define routes and how to call router.push() , but it does not say which patterns survive in production under load, how to enforce a hard latency ceiling, or what…