Should you move from APKs to App bundles?

App bundle is a new publishing format for Google Play that promises to reduce app size

Cookbook Recipes is India’s largest cooking app (in users) and also the smallest (in size)!

At Riafy, we try really hard to create the smallest apk possible. Neeraj uses several guidelines to optimise our apps so that they’re always less than 10MB in size. If you take a look at the top 5 cooking apps in the world, Cookbook Recipes is the smallest at just 7.05 MB! Cookbook already follows ‘Android Go’ guidelines, ‘build for billion’ guidelines, uses webp for resources, performs lint checks and more.

Law of diminishing returns — refer to a point at which the level of benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested.

When we came across Android App bundles, our first thought was this — Cookbook is already very small; can we really shrink it further? We reached out to Amrit Sanjeev from Google and he told us that there should be substantial reduction in size.

Implementation — straightforward

Neeraj finished migrating to App bundles quickly. According to him the changes are straightforward. Please check out the Android App bundles documentation here.

NOTE: You need to be using Google Play signing to migrate to app bundles. If you’re a legacy developer and signs apks yourself, please move to Google Play signing first before trying app bundles.

Result — 38.2% reduction in size

Migrating to app bundles alone reduced the size of Cookbook by a staggering 38.2%. With some additional optimisations, Neeraj managed to reduce the overall size by 49%.

Dynamic delivery via app bundles allowed Cookbook to reduce it download size by 38.2%

Should you try Android App bundles?

Additional optimisations has now reduced Cookbook from 7.05MB to < 3.5MB

Hell YES.

Dynamic delivery by App bundles is remarkable. To be able to reduce an app that has already been heavily optimised for size by 38.2% is an incredible feat. We are excited to release our smaller sized app to the end user with without compromising on the quality of user experience. Every Android developer should try it.

Picture this: Cookbook will be saving more than 3TB of data transfer for our next 1 million downloads.

If you loved reading about App bundles and it’s advantages, please hit the 👏 clap button. Do share this story with your friends who develop for Android.