When you enable method tracing for benchmarks, it's currently started with startActivityAndWait and it's disabled after the benchmark finishes.

Method tracing collects huge amount of data which might result in big trace file and might take long due to its nature to slow down the app's performance.

This causes problems for scenarios navigating to a certain screen and starting collection from there. For example start the app, log in, navigate to a screen and scroll some content. The interested part is only scrolling the content.

There might be several options how this could work:

Enable method traces for measureBlock. This would be intuitive with when benchmarks actually record data.
Have API to dynamically enable/disable method tracing. This might be helpful to record only part of the measure block. This could result in more polluted API though. What if you don't pass method androidx.benchmark.profiling.mode=MethodTracing`, but call the API?