[Brian]

No, that doesn't sound normal. (Well, the getting longer and longer part, anyway.)

Hmmm... if you open up settings on the phone, turn off "Auto-Sync" in the Synchronization settings, and then quit/relaunch the app on the phone, how long does launch take?

With the settings this way, we can separate out the synchronization portion of our startup activities from the process of starting the app and reading the data. That'll give us some useful information.