Christophe is a freelance Android developer from Belgium who fell in love with the green robot early on. He likes breathing life into all kinds of mobile apps, enhancing user experience and writing clean code. He also contributes to the software community by sharing his findings about Kotlin and Android through pull requests, bug reports, blog posts and occasional talks.
His spare time is all about food, cats, travelling, swimming, movies and video games.
Christophe Beyls
Freelance Android Developer at Dreamy Robots
In search of lightness: Advanced Android app shrinking techniques
With the inner complexity of Android apps gradually increasing over the years, it has become crucial to use tools to reduce their footprint in production. But simply enabling code and resource shrinking is not enough to make your release builds as small as they could be!
In this talk, we're going to take a full tour of the available techniques to put apps on a diet, including undocumented ones. We will see how Jetpack Compose enables new minification opportunities compared to the classic Views system. We will discover the limitations of R8 and the resources shrinker and figure out how to work around them in order to eliminate the last unused bytes of APK files.
This will be illustrated with concrete file sizes and case studies of real applications.
Learn how to tweak your code, resources and configuration to make your apps lighter than ever!