How We Reduced Our App Size By 50% With Split APKs

We recently hit our app size upload limit to the Google Play Store, which is 100 mb. Instead of using Android App Bundles, we wanted to see if we could reduce our app size without it.

So we analyzed our APK:

Notice the five folders in the lib folder.

They are taking up a lot of space! Turns out that these folders are compiled ABIs, which is basically just Android machine code. This is how the code you write actually runs on the CPU on your device. Your device needs one of these folders to actually run your code.

So why are there five ABIs in our APK when a device only needs one? Well, the short of it is that we use Realm for our app’s and Realm uses the NDK or…