Anyone noticed that APK size has increased drastically when using compose. Starter application in XM...

# compose

[Danish Ansari]

Anyone noticed that APK size has increased drastically when using compose. Starter application in XML takes 4.2 MB whereas starter app in Compose is 7.2 MB having 5 .dex files. Why there are so many dex files in a starter app?
Edit: I noticed that starter app in XML also has 3 dex files, why is this happening, does this have anything to do with recent versions of Android gradle plugin?

[Albert Chang]

It's meaningless to measure APK size using debug builds. You should use R8-enabled release builds.

[Sergey Y.]

also, check https://medium.com/androiddevelopers/jetpack-compose-before-and-after-8b43ba0b7d4f

[Albert Chang]

Also, if it's a pure compose app, you can remove the dependencies on AppCompat and Material (as Tivi did), which also saves a lot.

[Tolriq]

That article misses an intermediary step as the size reduction only occurs after removal of appcompat and material. From real world test with R8 compose add about 1Mb of DEX. Default created application from AS still by default use the material lib theme + app compat hence size increase. I'm not sure an empty default app should still do that.

[Danish Ansari]

Alright I compared with release unsigned APK with proguard enabled by removing androidx.core:core-ktx ,androidx.appcompat:appcompat ,androidx.compose.ui:ui-tooling-preview and androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-runtime-ktx from Compose app and the APK got reduced to 1.9MB as compared to XML app's 1.5MB

But the article says APK size got less as compared to older XML approach. how exactly? Could it be Fragments ?

[Danish Ansari]

I also tried to remove com.google.android.material:material but then I started getting errors as they are used to define themes which are used in AndroidManifest's android:theme

[Tolriq]

It is material, you need to remove it from the themes too https://github.com/chrisbanes/tivi/blob/main/app/src/main/res/values/themes.xml

[Danish Ansari]

Removing material library reduced the APK size to 504 KB

I have to say I'm impressed