Android support library increases APK size a lot

Question

I'm using AppCompat support library in my Android project. AppCompat has plenty of drawables and resources which I don't use in my app. That unnecessary files increases my 900K app to above 2M, which I don't like.
Is there any way to exclude those files when creating the APK file? Or I should obfuscate the library in my code instead of making a dependency? I'm using Gradle in Android Studio.

Thanks

EDIT 1 I am using proguard already. but proguard can't know I don't want to have drawable-xxxhdpi or values-it for example.

EDIT 2 I am also using Android Lint, which can't help me, beacuse I don't access to lib's code directly, and android adds them when building the APK file.

Answer 1

Starting from version 24.2.0, the v4 Support Library has been split into several smaller modules.

So, apart from using shrinkResources and proguardFiles, also make sure that you are using only the specific modules that your app needs. e.g.

If your app only uses Compat utils like NotificationCompat, ContextCompat or ResourcesCompat etc., use only the compat module as:

compile 'com.android.support:support-compat:24.2.0'

Answer 2

From Android Gradle Build System, since version 0.7.0:

New option on product Flavor (and defaultConfig) allow filtering of resources through the -c option of aapt You can pass single value (resConfig) or multiple values (resConfigs) through the DSL. All values from the default config and flavors get combined and passed to aapt. See "basic" sample. In the "basic" sample:

defaultConfig {
    ...
    resConfig "en"
    resConfigs "nodpi", "hdpi"
}

So, try the following to achieve what you asked for:

productFlavors {
    ...
    frOnly {
        resConfig "fr"
    }
    ...
}

Note that you might also want to include *dpi, port, land, etc.. as well.

Answer is from: Android Studio exports strings from support library to APK, thanks to Primoz990