Project Bonsai
Article Summary
Grab's Android app had 4 million lines of code and was bleeding users. Google's research showed every 6MB increase costs 1% of conversions.
Grab's engineering team launched Project Bonsai in 2021 to tackle app bloat that was hurting user acquisition across Southeast Asia's low-end devices and limited bandwidth. This deep dive covers their systematic approach to measurement, reduction, and containment.
Key Takeaways
- Achieved 26% reduction in app download size over six months
- Built custom App Sizer tool integrated with CI and Grafana for daily analytics
- Removed transitive R classes by upgrading AGP to 4.1.1
- Converted all PNG images to WebP format for size savings
- Identified one library contributing 8% of total app size and removed it
Critical Insight
Grab reduced their Android app download size by 26% through systematic measurement, aggressive R8 optimization, and resource cleanup across 1,500+ modules.
