How We Reduced the WINK+ Android App to Less Than 10MB
Article Summary
A solo Android engineer at WINK+ crushed their APK down to under 8MB while competitors bloat past 20MB with fewer features. Here's the playbook.
Julius Uy from the WINK+ team shares how extreme resource constraints forced creative optimization. The Singapore-based rewards app needed to stay lean without sacrificing its complex feature set, including QR code scanning across the city.
Key Takeaways
- Unbundled MLKit QR scanner via Google Play Services: saved 2MB instantly
- Switched Facebook SDK from full package to core-only modules
- Converted PNGs to VectorDrawables and optimized Lottie animations by 1MB
- Used APK Analyzer and Proguard to eliminate unused libraries and code
- Every 6MB increase drops install conversion by 1% (10MB = 2.5% in emerging markets)
The team reduced WINK+ to 7.85MB through surgical dependency management, asset optimization, and format conversions, proving small teams can outperform bloated competitors.
About This Article
WINK+ had inherited PNG assets from legacy code without the original Figma files. The team had to manually convert these rasterized images to vector format, which created jagged edges during the conversion process.
Julius Uy's team converted PNGs to SVG using freeconvert.com and then deployed Avocado to optimize the VectorDrawables. Avocado removed unnecessary points between lines. They accepted some minor visual artifacts to keep development moving forward.
Switching from bitmap to vector formats reduced image asset storage significantly. This helped bring the final APK size down to 7.85MB while keeping the images looking good on all device sizes.