Reducing Android app size in practice at LinkedIn | by Chao Zhang | Microsoft Mobile Engineering | Medium
Article Summary
LinkedIn reduced their Android app size by 27.5MB through aggressive optimization. Here's how they did it without compromising features.
Chao Zhang from LinkedIn's mobile team shares battle-tested techniques for Android app size reduction. This goes beyond the standard documentation to cover advanced strategies that delivered measurable results at scale.
Key Takeaways
- Play Feature Delivery saved 17MB by making video meeting SDK on-demand
- R8 optimization and obfuscation combined reduced size by 8.5MB
- Android App Bundle adoption was smooth; Feature Delivery had testing challenges
- 25% of crashes showed different stacktraces after R8 optimization
- Jetpack Compose will decrease app size long-term despite initial 740KB increase
Critical Insight
LinkedIn achieved significant app size reduction through Play Feature Delivery, R8 optimization, and strategic resource management, backed by quantitative analysis proving correlation between app size and install rates.
