on a side note, you might want to consider opt-in daemonizing/prestarting. its obnoxious to have your app always running without even notifying the user, but it can actually be a useful feature, and youre never going to get faster than without it.
There's a lot of time gone before the splash is shown. Maybe here you can find a cause You might try using qml profiler. You might try doing some cerr's to show what takes so long.