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I'm an android developer with apps around 100Kb, or 0.1Mb. The secret? Don't use android app compat, or rather, don't use any external library. Just plain old

I'm an android developer with apps around 100Kb, or 0.1Mb. The secret? Don't use android app compat, or rather, don't use any external library. Just plain old java. The apps are ugly (no themes) but they work extremely fast and to the point.

Y_Y 5y ago
https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=6280449025308262041 https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=628044902530826204... In case anyone else was wondering where to get such apps. Probably on F-Droid too?
- TrianguloY 5y ago
  Unfortunately no, or rather not yet. I guess it should be easy to publish most of them, as they are on GitHub already. (Except my most popular app by far, because in the past I had some issues with clones so I decided to kept its code private)
  - seniorivn 5y ago
    links please
    - TrianguloY 5y ago
      To the apps's source code? I guess the best list is on my blog [1] but each app in the play store should have the corresponding link [1] https://triangularapps.blogspot.com/p/apps.html https://triangularapps.blogspot.com/p/apps.html
TrianguloY 5y ago
Extra: maybe it was a bug or something, but when I tried one of my apps on an android 12 emulator, it reported a negative app size! (user data to be precise) https://ibb.co/TPjH5gh https://ibb.co/TPjH5gh
fouric 5y ago
> Don't use android app compat, or rather, don't use any external library. This feels like the analog of the "10 GB node_modules" meme. I wonder how much of the size explosion is due to feature bloat, inefficient implementation, backward-compatibility stuff, and external libraries...
- TrianguloY 5y ago
  Android studio lets you analyze apks and you can check more or less why the size is so big. Last time I checked it was a mix of assets (images mainly) and rarely used functions. In the case of app compat almost all is due to backward compatibility. That library allows you to use features intended for newer APIs, but making it compatible with older versions. This has advantages (mainly the themes) but it also means that the apps contains a lot of assets and code that will never run. The app bundle reduced this problem, but it's still present.

Y_Y 5y ago

https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=6280449025308262041 https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=628044902530826204... In case anyone else was wondering where to get such apps. Probably on F-Droid too?

TrianguloY 5y ago
Unfortunately no, or rather not yet. I guess it should be easy to publish most of them, as they are on GitHub already. (Except my most popular app by far, because in the past I had some issues with clones so I decided to kept its code private)
- seniorivn 5y ago
  links please
  - TrianguloY 5y ago
    To the apps's source code? I guess the best list is on my blog [1] but each app in the play store should have the corresponding link [1] https://triangularapps.blogspot.com/p/apps.html https://triangularapps.blogspot.com/p/apps.html

TrianguloY 5y ago

Extra: maybe it was a bug or something, but when I tried one of my apps on an android 12 emulator, it reported a negative app size! (user data to be precise) https://ibb.co/TPjH5gh https://ibb.co/TPjH5gh

fouric 5y ago

> Don't use android app compat, or rather, don't use any external library. This feels like the analog of the "10 GB node_modules" meme. I wonder how much of the size explosion is due to feature bloat, inefficient implementation, backward-compatibility stuff, and external libraries...

TrianguloY 5y ago
Android studio lets you analyze apks and you can check more or less why the size is so big. Last time I checked it was a mix of assets (images mainly) and rarely used functions. In the case of app compat almost all is due to backward compatibility. That library allows you to use features intended for newer APIs, but making it compatible with older versions. This has advantages (mainly the themes) but it also means that the apps contains a lot of assets and code that will never run. The app bundle reduced this problem, but it's still present.