Help with reducing Android APK sizes

[Philby Dias]

Hello,

I am working on upgrading my chromium version from 114 to 138 but the chromium build itself without any customisation generates x64 APKs around 108MB in “Download size”- when analysis in Android Studio. I currently build all 4 variants for arm64, arm7, x64 and x86 and distribute separately.

I had similar issues when migrating to 126 last time and could not proceed with the upgrade, would really appreciate any assistance with this. I currently build chromium with the following args.gn:

target_os = "android"

target_cpu = "x64"

is_debug = false

android_channel = "stable"

is_official_build = true

is_component_build = false

symbol_level = 0

v8_use_external_startup_data = true

icu_use_data_file = false

ffmpeg_branding = "Chrome"

proprietary_codecs = true

update_android_aar_prebuilts = true

is_high_end_android=true

chrome_pgo_phase = 0

enable_nacl = false

enable_webrtc = false

enable_web_speech = false

And I build it using: ninja -C out/Release chrome_public_apk. Attached below is also the APK analyser result.

I realise AABs can be used to increase this limit, but I am concerned about zip align issues, especially considering once I enable play signing there is no going back and I would not want our users to be affected by getting a new application to download. So I would still prefer to somehow reduce the size of APKs if there is some way I have missed, please let me know.

Greatly appreciate your advice, thanks!

Philby