The Apk file exported from Android Studio is too large

Question

I have never used Android Studio before. The size of a simple "Hello world" app generated by default is almost 800k, while it is less than 100k in eclipse. I find that there are too many pictures in the drawable files, they seem come from res/all under the build folder, they still exist even if I delete the folder res manually.

My question is how to shrink the apk size in this situation?

Answer 1

The difference is due to the appcompat library which is compiled in by default to New Project Wizard-generated projects in Android Studio if you target an API level lower than 14. When I ran a test, the size increase was 642k for a debug APK, and 411k for a release APK (with Proguard enabled -- that will strip out unused code but not unused resources).

There's not a lot you can really do about this, short of removing the appcompat library if you're not using any of its features (though you should probably be using its features).