Optimising Flipkart Android App size to sub 10 MB
Article Summary
Flipkart slashed their Android app size by 40% in 21 months. The result? A 34% drop in uninstall rates and massive gains in emerging markets.
The Flipkart engineering team documented their journey optimizing their Android app to under 10MB. In markets like India and Brazil, every 10MB reduction correlates with a 2.5% increase in install conversion rates, making app size a critical growth lever.
Key Takeaways
- ProGuard optimization alone saved 3MB when configured correctly
- Automated CI checks block PRs that increase APK size by over 100KB
- Image compression and XML drawables reduced bundle size by 1MB
- Multi-APK architecture splits saved 600KB per build
- Removing unused libraries and resources freed up 3MB+ total
Through systematic optimization (ProGuard, resource cleanup, library audits, and automated checks), Flipkart reduced their APK by over 40%, directly improving user acquisition and retention metrics.
About This Article
Flipkart's Android app had unused resources and redundant libraries like NineOldAndroid and Logback sitting in the codebase. ProGuard settings weren't configured properly, so the code wasn't getting obfuscated effectively. All of this made the APK unnecessarily large.
Sourabh Gupta's team used Android Studio's refactoring tools to clean up unused resources. They ran gradle dependency analysis to find and remove unnecessary libraries. Then they fixed the ProGuard configurations by looking up library-specific rules on GitHub for Glide, OkHttp, and OrmLite.
Just fixing the ProGuard configuration saved an additional 1MB beyond the initial 3MB reduction. Removing libraries and cleaning up resources freed another 800KB from debug and release differentiation, plus 450KB from language resource restrictions.