Would it be possible to show a message to the app user/visitor saying “Initializing your app…” or something along those lines while the app is waking up?
One possible challenge would be having to detect whether the request comes from a browser, so that you don’t respond to AJAX requests with a bunch of HTML.
Yep. I’m mostly okay with the delay, but I’d like the visitors to know that this is not a problem with my app, that it just takes a bit longer to start.