Getting Santa Tracker Into Shape
Posted by Sam Stern, Developer Programs Engineer Santa Tracker is a holiday tradition at Google. In addition to bringing seasonal joy to millions of users around the world, it's a yearly testing ground for the latest APIs and techniques in app development. That's why the full source of the app is released on Github every year. In 2016, the Santa team challenged itself to introduce new content to the app while also making it smaller and more efficient than ever before. In this post, you can read about the road to a more slimmer, faster Santa Tracker. APK Bloat Santa Tracker has grown over the years to include the visual and audio assets for over a dozen games and interactive scenes. In 2015, the Santa Tracker APK size was 66.1 MB. The Android Studio APK analyzer is a great tool to investigate what made the 2015 app so large. First, while the APK size is 66.1 MB, we see that the download size is 59.5MB! The majority of that size is in the resources folder, but ...