TL; DR. Be stubborn when it comes to quality of your product. Four weeks ago, I published in Play Store. Before coming to the details of the story, here’s some background. my first application I am , a senior year computer science student at Government Engineering College, Thrissur. I’ve been into programming and application development for past few years. Irshad The story starts around 5 months back; when one day, , who is in his sophomore year told me that he wants to learn Android Application Development. Atul Nair The best way to learn anything is actually by doing it. and my advice was to make a simple Android app as a start and learn along the process. And I threw in a cliché idea of an app. A cliché idea… • An application that simply displays the recent statuses of other WhatsApp users with option to share and save them.• User can post videos longer than 30 seconds to WhatsApp. • User can post audio statuses by adding customize visualization and images. NB: WhatsApp status feature was still young at that time. so it sounded like a good idea. So we started making it! Here’s a rough sketch of the entire app which I drew that day. 😂 (We codenamed it Project Mascot; No idea why ) And what happened? Well, we divided the tasks into three. “Recents” “Video status” “Audio status” I had the initial excitement and enthusiasm which made me build the “Recents” feature in 2–3 days since it was a fairly simple and familiar task for us. Then I started assisting Atul in developing the Video status feature. As I had several other projects, it was mostly me doing only research on video libraries for Android and stuff while he tried out some actual code. “Video status” Feature finished.. but wait… Yeah, he was a good learner and within a week, he sent me an apk with video splitting feature as we talked about! It was all smooth and working, but there was just one problem! The apk size was 31 mb, and I simply didn’t accept it. We decided to use the famous library for the video processing. The easiest way to was to use the famous library by WritingMinds. We used the initial which was more than 27 mb themselves. this was causing the huge size of apk ffmpeg Ffmpeg-Android prebuilt libraries I told him that we should work on it and reduce it as much as possible. After some more research,googling and weeks, he comes to me again, and the apk size was now!. and the app worked exactly the same as before. He followed and included only the armv7 version of ffmpeg which helped in reducing app size by half. 18 mb this So I said Ok. This is good! but not good enough! and I told him… “The app size should be less than 5 MB. Otherwise, people are not gonna download it and hence, we’re not gonna release it” And . I showed him some video editor apps in Play Store which takes only less than 5 MB and said I was stubborn about it “if they can do it; why can’t us?” So we got back into it, But the project dragged a lot since both of us got busy with academic stuff and exams. And one day, he messages me saying he brought it to less than 10 MB! (I told you this guy was good) Ok that’s good enough.. but I looked into some native development stuff and ways to for Android with only essential features. None of it worked out well. I was stubborn . compile our own ffmpeg Time dragged, days went by…. and one day he comes to me with a good news He made it 2.6 MB! (that’s 12 times smaller than initial one!!!) He was stubborn too!.. he researched it thoroughly all over the internet and found the right solution. Basically, he found a native C++ compiled .so file for ffmpeg with minimum features that includes the feature we want too. It was 4 MB. then he compressed it as aar which only took 2 MB. Here’s an analysis of the version 1.2 apk file. (Oops.. it’s actually 2.9 MB now after the latest updates including support for WhatsApp for Business) Package analysis of WhatSaga version 1.2.0 We also used features like proguard minify and drawable optimisation so that other resources didn’t take up much space. Things went faster, we didn’t wait to create the “Audio status” feature*. We launched our app on Play Store within couple of days!! We named it If you are the curious type, do checkout our app: WhatSaga, ( because the name resembles WhatsApp and Saga means longer stories which was our primary feature!.) https://goo.gl/nvjNRc “Ok. So?” Let’s get to the reason I am writing this article. I would have probably settled for the solution or even worse. Which would have been terrible compared to a Imagine if I had not been stubborn! 10–15 MB 2.6 MB You might be asking if app size really matter so much in modern phones where users have Gigabytes of memory and bandwidth? The answer is Yes!. App size matter more than you think. If you have two applications which does the same thing with same UI, and one is slightly heavier by 3–4 MBs than the other, which one will you go for? The answer is obviously the lighter one. Less app size => More happy users So what did I learn from this? Be Stubborn! Yeah!! Be stubborn about the quality of whatever you are making. Whether it be or anything; be stubborn and push yourself and your team to the limits. Never settle till your product has the quality you desire. design, execution time visual quality and appearance, If you reached this far, thanks for reading this really long article. This is my first article on medium, so please excuse the mistakes and do give me feedback and suggestions :). . Thank you!! Consider following me on twitter for more updates on my coming articles If you want to read about an extreme version of perfectionism, checkout Why the iPad has never shipped with a calculator app

How we brought down the size of our app from 31 MB to 2.6 MB and what it taught us

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