Despite developing an attractive and user-friendly mobile application, the size of the application plays an important role in the success of the application. Large size applications take up a lot of storage space and might create a nuisance. As users install more applications in their devices, they can not install apps that hold high storage space nor compromise on the quality of the application.
Majority of the Android users have agreed to the fact that Android apps use the largest lumps of their mobile space. Although many clouds support for video, music, photos, many people look for so much for a phone to take tramping and hanging.
Size - the major issue in the App Development
As per Google’s statistics, 90% of the mobile devices run on the Android platform, and there are nearly 2.8 million apps in the Play Store. The statistics show that the competition and difficulty in making the application successful in the market.
Added to it, Google also stated that mobile application that has size more than 150MB the installation of the application can be lowered to 30% and for every increase of 6MB size the conversion rate for installation can drop to 1%. From this, Android app developers should consider the point that the size of the application plays a major role in app installation as 805 of the users check through it.
Some of the primary reasons for the increase in application size is that most of the app developers concentrate more on providing high features, a wide range of screen sizes, attractive UX designs and many more. All this makes the application to develop in a larger size. So, are you looking for ways to reduce the size of your application? Then continue reading the article.
5 Different ways to reduce the size at the time of app development
Image compression
The image size can be conveniently reduced by compressing the images without diluting the quality. Many free and paid tools are available online for conversion. Some of the tools are pack jpg suit .jpg file and guetzli compression are some of the best tools available. There are certain stages where some images can be designed with dynamic resources. In that case, the framework is enough to design the images dynamically at the runtime. It is recommended to compress or convert the .jpg and .png images to .webp web image format to reduce the size of the image without affecting the quality.
Remove Unnecessary Code
It is common in mobile app development that developers hang to code’s footprint where codes are generated automatically. Example, there are many protocol buffer tools to develop classes and methods in excess and these codes are no way good to the application as they are just going to increase the size of the app. So, developers need to find the code that is repetitive and unused and remove it to optimize the size of the application.
Reuse resources
In certain cases, reusing the existing resources is better than removing or adding resources. For example, you will have discreet resources to design images pertaining to orientation, tints, and shades. You can use the same existing resources to design other images by customizing based on the requirements. Reusing the existing resources will help you in scrolling performance of the application and considerably reduces the size.
Remove unused class and resources
The Android studio contains a static code analyzer known as lint that can analyze and detect the unnecessary class and resources present in the code. Whenever lint tools crawl the code and find the unused resources, then it throws messages that these resources are unused. If you want to remove resources and classes automatically, then Gradle is the best choice.
Maintain APK files
In some APKs the content is added along with code, but it is hardly used in the development. For example, add-ons like additional languages come along with the APKs which are not necessary but are downloaded anyway. One best way to get rid of this is by uploading the app in the Google Play Store through Android App Bundles. Google will optimize the APKs based on the device configuration and removes unused content in the APKs.
Conclusion
Always, remember slimmer the app size higher is the performance of the application download rate. So, concentrate on the tips mentioned above to optimize your app and deliver a highly reliable application.
