The disclosure provides for a user equipment (UE) detecting an indication of an application-specific latency reduction triggering condition that may trigger switching of a communication state of the UE. For example, the UE may be in an initial state. The UE may transition into a different state that is associated with lower latency for data transfer. In an aspect, the UE may trigger the indication for latency reduction even when the network-configured criteria for the indication has not yet been met. The UE may trigger an application-specific latency reduction triggering condition during the startup of an application, which triggers a resource request message even before the network-configured threshold value for generating such resource request messages is satisfied. The resource request message may cause the network to command the UE to transition to a state that has a latency less than that in the current state.