Keeping Up with Android App Size Growth
Article Summary
Square manages hundreds of mobile engineers in a monorepo, all contributing to apps that must stay under Google Play's 150 MB limit. How do they prevent app bloat at scale?
Square's mobile team shares their journey from manual spreadsheet tracking to automated app size monitoring. They needed visibility into APK growth across multiple build variants while keeping teams accountable for size increases.
Key Takeaways
- Automated PNG to WebP conversion after Emerge Tools quantified exact savings potential
- Set dual thresholds: 500 KB diffs for PRs and absolute milestones for long-term tracking
- Slack alerts caught a third-party library adding unwanted x86 binaries
- R8 minification impact verified instantly across all build targets in CI
- Moved from manual spreadsheets to automated CI uploads with dashboard visibility
Critical Insight
Automated size tracking with tuned alert thresholds transformed app size from an overlooked metric into actionable team conversations.
