The Play Store uses these bundles to generate an optimized Android application package (APK) for every device. How does Ruler work?Īndroid apps are typically packaged and uploaded to the Play Store as App Bundles. It allows you to analyze your app and gives you detailed insights into the origin and size of certain files, modules, and third-party dependencies. Ruler is a Gradle plugin that solves this exact problem. This can make it hard to analyze app size and determine where optimization opportunities lie. All of these modules and dependencies are merged and packaged into a single app, without a clear way to determine where things came from. The codebase of the main Android Spotify app consists of over 1,000 Gradle modules and hundreds of third-party dependencies. Those work great if you want to get a high-level overview of your app, but when we wanted to dig deeper, we quickly arrived at another question - how much are certain modules and dependencies contributing to the overall app size? We set out to see how we could decrease app size, and started our investigations by using existing tools like Diffuse and Android Studio.

That’s why we built and open sourced Ruler - a tool to measure and analyze the size of your Android apps, built with automation in mind. And since shrinking download size has been shown to improve install conversion rate, we aim to keep the app as lean as possible.īut working with app size is not always easy, particularly for large applications with numerous contributors adding cool new features. One important metric related to this goal is the size of the Spotify app - if it’s too big, users with poor network connectivity or little device storage might not be able to download it. As mobile developers, that means we want everybody to be able to download our app without hiccups or constraints. At Spotify, we strive to make our apps available to as many people as possible.

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