APK Expansion Files

Rickyngk

I've heard about APK Expansion Files. http://developer.android.com/guide/google/play/expansion-files.html
Have you had experience about this stuff ? Please share

Scouser

The scary thing here is that you feel the need to investigate this stuff. 50MB is a fairly large app by anybody's standard and you must have some outstanding visuals and audio to create an APK that big.

Bearing in mind that an APK file is nothing more than a ZIP file then your source data would have to be huge. Most APK files I have seen are compressed to about 33% of their original size so a 50MB APK would contain approx 150MB of data.

That is some serious game you're contemplating there

OZApps

@scouser, you have seen the size of files that some frameworks create and some developers do not optimize their artwork and end up with massive sized files with the @2x suffix (I know it is not applicable for Android as much as it is for iOS) but yes, with an app of greater than 50MB it should have some serious Audio and Video capabilities/functionality.

moopf

@scouser, you have seen the size of files that some frameworks create and some developers do not optimize their artwork and end up with massive sized files with the @2x suffix (I know it is not applicable for Android as much as it is for iOS) but yes, with an app of greater than 50MB it should have some serious Audio and Video capabilities/functionality.

Why isn't it as applicable for Android on image sizes? I'm not sure I follow as there are equivalent devices for sd, x2 and x4 on Android as well. I can see no reason to think that your image assets would be smaller on Android than iOS. And optimised or not, dishing out x2 and x4 in the same app does lead to bloating, it's unavoidable.

On the original question, my last app was around 20mb on iOS but this was due to having a massive number of art assets for the built in face creator - this was released before for the retina iPad so it only has sd and x2 artwork. That and high quality music will always inflate the app size.

Fieldrunners (1 and 2) both come in under 50mb on iOS (only just though). That should give you an idea of just what can be done with that limit - in other words, a lot.

atilim

And as an another example, Dark Knight Rises is only 1.8Gb: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gameloft.android.ANMP.GloftKRHM

Rickyngk

Well organizing should keep apk lightweight, but sometimes it takes us too much time. In the order hand, when we try to port multiple screen size in one apk, it's nightmare.

I'm thinking about an "installer". APK is only an installer of game. At the first time running, it detects which extension pack should be downloaded.

About GL game, it's too power & heavy than my phone is

OZApps

On the original question, my last app was around 20mb on iOS but this was due to having a massive number of art assets for the built in face creator - this was released before for the retina iPad so it only has sd and x2 artwork. That and high quality music will always inflate the app size.

@Moopf, The App I created for a client ZDAY Survival Simulator is about 20MB and supports all of the device right from the iPhone3G to the new iPad. We have done some really creative stuff with the graphics to keep them low in size. It is available for all platforms, in the testing phase this was about 50MB+ and the final app could have easily weighed in at about 75+MB.

Another client that wanted an internal use app, a catalogue reached a size of 150 MB, they were difficult to talk to and explain things to. So their app was finally about 225MB in size with all the images (and not even hi-res or @2x, @4x, etc) iPads only..

moopf

@OZApps, I'm interested to know what creative stuff you did with the graphics. For my work I always do the following:

1. Use packed textures (which is why I'm finding bugs with Gideros' handling of them with higher resolution artwork when trim is used in the packed textures)
2. Slices, which are tiled and stretched for things like arbitrary length buttons, page backings etc. I use methods such as 9-slice, for instance.
3. A lot of use of image tinting so the original images are white and I colour to suit in the app so I can re-use images if I need them displayed in different colours.

But if you're doing other things, I'd be interested to know what. Always keen to learn new tricks.

OZApps

@moopf, I will maybe write an article on that, it could be helpful to a lot many.

moopf

@OZApps OK, I'll wait for that then. Shame you can't share on this thread though.