Identify What to Attack

Back in an earlier chapter, we looked at the APK Analyzer and the sorts of output it can provide:

That particular app — the HelloWorld project from the earliest chapters — has about 250KB of resources, with the rest of the APK mostly made up of compiled code. For a “Hello, World” app, that is rather large, since the app does not really do anything.

In this case, most of the app size is coming from compiled code. In such a scenario, you will want to look at removing unnecessary dependencies and otherwise shrinking your code. For cases where resources dominate the app space, removing unnecessary dependencies is still useful, but you will also want to see about removing any unnecessary resources and shrinking your app’s images.