How to modularize your app and take advantage of Android App Bundles conditional delivery features. — Co-authored by Dom Elliott and Ben Weiss Android App Bundle is the new publishing format for Android apps, replacing the monolithic APK. An app bundle is not installed directly. Instead, Google Play generates optimized APKs for each device from the app bundle. Compared to a monolithic APK, the APKs generated…

Over the past few months I’ve been working on addressing some of the feedback I got from developers who were using dynamic feature modules in their apps. A common theme was the lack of good testing support and their speed of development being affected by having to upload an artifact…

Update: Mentions of using ServiceLoader have been removed, as using it for Dynamic Features is no longer supported by R8, and using it without R8 optimizations is not recommended due to performance issues. In this post I am going to show you how to solve a common problem that arises…

Post 2 of 2: How fixing crashes and unnecessary wake locks can improve Play Store performance — I’m excited that more and more of you are finding success fixing app quality issues using the Android vitals section in the Google Play Console. Since my first article about Android vitals, we’ve been making improvements to bring you new metrics and features. …

Post 1 of 2: How fixing ANR events and excessive wakeups can improve Play Store performance — For an app developer there is no better measure of success than happy users, and preferably a lot of them. The best way to achieve this is to have a great app that people want to use, but what do we mean by “great”? It boils down to two things…

In my previous article I explained why everyone should use ProGuard for their Android apps, how to enable it and what kind of errors you might encounter when doing so. There was a lot of theory involved, as I think it’s important to understand the underlying principles in order to…

Update 2018–05–23: As of Android Plugin for Gradle 3.2 Canary 15 the workarounds for Instant App builds described in this article are not required. The build now correctly uses code from all modules for the Proguard steps and then redistributes them back to the feature APKs. Consider the rest of…

Why ProGuard? ProGuard is a tool that shrinks, optimizes and obfuscates code. While there are other tools available for developers, ProGuard is readily available as part of the Android Gradle build process and ships with the SDK. There are many reasons why you might want to enable ProGuard when building your app…

New: support for File-by-File updates in the APK patch size estimator Reducing APK size has been a hot topic during the past year. There are a lot of reasons why: whether you’re Building for Billions to reach users with less capable devices on costly and unreliable networks or you’re just…