Mercado Libre Rodrigo Pintos Nov 14, 2022

Nuestra aplicación Android está a dieta: ¡Dynamic Features!

Article Summary

Rodrigo Pintos from Mercado Libre reveals how they tackled a critical problem: keeping 120M active users from uninstalling their app due to storage constraints. Their solution? Putting their Android app on a diet with Dynamic Features.

Mercado Libre's Android team faced growing app bloat as features accumulated. Traditional optimization methods (code obfuscation, asset compression) weren't enough anymore. They turned to Google's Dynamic Features to fundamentally change how users download and store their app.

Key Takeaways

Critical Insight

Mercado Libre reduced app size and improved user retention by implementing Dynamic Features to deliver functionality on demand rather than upfront.

This is part one of a series where they'll reveal the architectural changes, dependency management challenges, and actual results from implementing this across two massive apps.

About This Article

Problem

Mercado Libre's five Android apps were growing too large as new features kept piling up. Code obfuscation and asset compression weren't enough to handle the bloat for 120 million active users.

Solution

Rodrigo Pintos and his team turned to Google's Dynamic Features and Android App Bundle format. This let them break the app into modules that could be installed in three different ways: at install time, conditionally based on device state, or on demand. Users only downloaded what they actually needed.

Impact

The modular approach worked. Installation conversion rates went up because the initial download was smaller. Users kept the app longer because it didn't hog storage space, which mattered a lot for people with limited device capacity.