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I developed a game, and build it as an Android APK file. I was not using any assets, only a UI panel and a UI Button. I thought the APK file woul be 3 MB, but it was 18MB.
On the Google Play store, there are many good games using good graphics that have a small size. Some are only 5MB or 6MB. I want to know why I am getting such a large APK file.
How do I reduce the size of my APK file?
When you build APK in Unity then the entire engine code is included as a library, the last time I've checked it was about 9-10MB, but I'm sure it changes between engine and/or Android versions. For this reason you can't get below this size and all your assets are just added on top of it.
Change the extension of your APK to zip and open the file as regular archive to see more details.
I had a similar problem. Try reducing and compressing the size of the textures. I reduced the size of my assets while ensuring that their quality remains the same .
Unity 5 Android builds seem to be larger than previous versions. That being said, if you look in the build's player settings and use ARMv7 instead of FAT (Armv 7 + x86) the size will be reduced some, but this will also make the app incompatible with mobile devices that use a full x86 processor. Such devices are far less common though.
Often textures take up most space in the build. The first to do is to use compressed texture formats (DXT(Desktop platforms) or PVRTC) where you can.
Meshes and imported Animation Clips can be compressed so they take up less space in your game file. Compression can be turned on in the Mesh Import Settings.
When building a player, you should avoid any dependencies on System.dll or System.Xml.dll. Unity does not include these in the built player by default but if you use their classes then they will get included. These DLLs will add about a megabyte to the player’s storage size.
ProGuard
A tool for code shrinking, like ProGuard, will significantly reduce the static foot print. Note that it is very important to re-test all of the application after applying ProGuard since it may change the application behavior.
As ProGuard replaces the application symbols, to make the code difficult to read, it is important that you retain the symbol mapping, so that you can translate a stack trace back to the original symbols if you have to investigate a crash in your application.
- Answer submitted by GrisHu to "Does including JAR in android projects affect the size of the APK" at Stack Overflow.
