How to optimize the size of your app and boost installs?

This article was originally published on my LinkedIn page in September 2020 and could be really useful for growing your organic traffic and optimizing the size of the application build.

Hello everyone and thank you for reading my new article. A traditional disclaimer: I’m not trying to convince anybody that my experience is the only true way to do things. I just want to share my thoughts about the things that I think are important and that are working in my company.

As some of you might know, Full HP relies a lot on organic traffic. Last 6 months we were working hard on improving the beta version of our new title — Battle Forces.

Size of the game — why is this important?

The main concern about this game was the size of the build. All our previous games had some funny art styles like pixel or low-poly graphics but this time it was a realistic shooter with several big dynamic maps, different operators with different abilities, high detailed models, and destructible objects — now this is going to weight a lot.

As always, we’ve started from Android, Google Play specifically. It’s just the way we are used to launching new games — Google Play is the most flexible platform in terms of soft-launch, A/B testing, and experiments.

But it’s not that transparent about its algorithms. While Apple has some guides about Basic Optimization to Reduce Your App’s Size and Advanced Optimization to Further Reduce Your App’s Size, Google Play discloses its rules to only some extent, making you guess about the rest.

Traditionally, we have not only Tier 1 countries like the USA and Japan but also countries like Brazil or Thailand among our top GEOs. At the moment over 16000 Android-powered devices available on the market and most of them are having low-end configurations, limited storage capacity, and even 2G or 3G connectivity. And we had to keep that in mind.

I’m always pushing my team towards platform guidelines and since there is a dedicated App Size section in Android Vitals, it seemed really important for the indication in Google Play. Not to mention the obvious reasons to reduce the file size because players don’t like to download tons of the content. Because of the limited storage or because of the internet costs — doesn’t really matter. Until you optimize the size of your app, you will be losing a part of your well-deserved traffic.

“Size” — it’s not that simple.

Our CEO Denis Fedchenko differs the definition of “size” by two: Actual Size and Indicated Size. Google Play, in return, divides the Indicated Size into two more categories: Download Size and Install Size.

I have decided to dig deeper and this is what I’ve found out.

Official Play Console Help ( support.google.com) says that app size is one of the biggest factors that can affect your app’s install and uninstall metrics, so it’s important to regularly monitor and understand how you can reduce your app’s download and install sizes. The two sizes are related but here’s how they’re different from each other:

Download size: The size of your app that users download on Google Play. When an app has a larger download size, it takes longer to download.

Size on the device (at install time): The amount of space required to install your app. Since apps are compressed when they’re downloaded, it can make install sizes larger than download sizes. When an app has a larger install size, more space is required on a user’s device to complete the installation. After the app is opened, its size on disk varies depending on app usage.

What does that really mean?

We create our games on Unity. By default, Unity splits your application build into APK and OBB extension files. Google insists to use Android Asset Bundles (*.aab) instead of OBB but it’s not mandatory — the choice is yours.

APK consists of the executive (Java and/or Native), plug-ins, scripts, and first scene data (with 0 index). You upload your APK to the Google Play Developer Console and that is the file that determines the App Download Size — the compressed size of your game downloaded by users at install time.

It’s safe to say that APK basically serves as a launcher. But when a user downloads that launcher, he/she also need to extract it to the device environment. And that is where Install Size comes to the scene.

The install size is the approximate size of your game on the user’s device after installation before the app is opened for the first time. Once the app is opened, the size of the app will vary depending on app usage — that is important.

These two things are what we call the Indicated Size. Google indicates the initial file and its size after unpacking just to inform users correctly about the amount of disk space he or she will require to install that game launcher. Google doesn’t care about the amount of data the user will have to download after he installs the launcher — once the app is opened, the size of the app will vary depending on app usage.

To check if this is true let’s return to Battle Forces.

Previously our initial build contained the whole main menu with store, settings, daily rewards, and other metadata. Our CEO decided to put all that stuff in OBB. After implementing the changes, we’ve reduced the app size by 60% which is a success that is leaving our peers far behind.

Looks great and there is still room for improvement! But don’t think that you can fix the Indicated Size and forget about the Actual Size. Users don’t want to download tons of files, remember? You have to keep an eye on that golden balance and reduce all the unnecessary files that require too many resources to stay on the top of the Google Play listing.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.