![]() The argument was that Instant App will first launch in the US, which is largely English speaking. We then decided to remove every other language support apart from English. With that, we are still 700 KB above the size limit. ![]() If we get rid of login, we can shave off around 800 KB worth of file size because of the various SSO libraries as well as features involving user login such as Viki Pass Subscription and its image assets. Without any assets or resources left to remove, we were now reduced to asking ourselves, what are the core features that need to remain? From 5.5 MB to 4.15 MB This could have helped us quite a bit but anyway, this is something we have to live with.Īt that point, we were still at around 5.5 MB. Without ProGuard, you don’t have a means to minify your application either. Hence it spawned blogs like this which of course, Google fixed nicely several iterations later. They said yes.īy the way, in the early days of Android Instant App, ProGuard was NOT supported. So we went to the design team and begged them to let us remove these custom fonts. Remember, this was also a time when downloadable fonts were not yet supported. We also noticed that font files were taking up around 1.5 MB of storage space. That effectively shaved off quite a sum as well. Next, we had our image files compressed with tinypng. That shaved off quite a bit of our file size.² So we decided to get rid of every other image files apart from those two because Android will automatically downsample or upscale the image anyway. At that time, we have images for ldpi, mdpi, hdpi, xhdpi, xxhdpi, and tvdpi (because the original Nexus 7, which was still popular at that time, is using tvdpi, and it’s not even a TV!) At that time, the most popular pixel densities were mdpi and xxhdpi. So anyway we used APK Analyzer to find out how we can reduce our APK size. Remember that this was a time when Android App Bundle didn’t exist yet. On the other hand, Google can only accommodate the app if it’s 4 MB or less. At that time, our app size was around 11 MB. The most challenging one was reducing the APK file size. Out of those six, five were quite straightforward, such as enabling App Links and so forth. There are six requirements to get an app to be Instant App compatible. You can imagine how insane this was with only two engineers and mounting tech debts. That means we only have two weeks to get our app ready. Google told us that they’ll be launching Instant App on August 15. So we started a conversation with Google and we got into the Early Access Program on August 1. We sat down with the PMs and decided that it’s worth a shot to experiment on this. more users means more subscribers means more money to give us some runway to clean up tech debts). ![]() incurring tech debts here and there) but served us elsewhere in pushing more user acquisitions and subscriptions (i.e. With a paltry engineering team, we are very much forced to make tradeoffs that are unsightly for engineers (i.e. At that time, my colleague Richard was working on Android TV and I was working on the mobile app. Back then, we only had two Android engineers, myself included. It wasn’t until June or early July, a full month and more after I/O 2016 did we start thinking about Instant App. After thinking about it and working on the first iteration of the Daydream SDK, it turned out to be too complex and risky, so we dropped the idea. Viki had a radical shift in our product ideology beginning in 2015 and between 20, Viki thrived in the range of products and features we churned out.¹Īnyway, back in Mountain View, I had a long chat with one engineer from the Daydream team to get an idea on how we can build Viki on it. Back in 2014 when Android TV was announced, our competitor DramaFever beat us into it by two years. We thought that by the time the market is flooded with these devices, it’d be good if we have our app there. I’m thinking…Ĭan we build a Viki app for Google Daydream and transpile it to support HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Playstation VR? Google Daydreamīack in 2016, the VR hype attracted a lot of OEMs to develop their own hardware devices. In our flight back to Singapore, there’s one thing that’s running in my mind, a feature that was also announced in the conference. While Instant App looked cool, it was never really in our radar. The 66 apps initially slated to launch with Instant App functionality ![]()
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