Reducing Android package size

[joeraz]

@lufebe16, we've previously had discussions about concerns with the Android package size.

Outside of adding games, one of my main goals so far has been supporting more modern, higher-resolution graphics, while leaving users the ability to go back to the old style if they choose. Of course, options means more images, which means a larger package. And I've also been getting quite a few image contributions lately. So I'm trying to come up with a solution to reduce the package size, while not limiting user contributions.

First, there are a number of files in the data directory that don't look like they're being used in the Kivy version, and can probably be safely removed from the package (though this should be tested first):

• data/images/buttons - not sure if these are still used at all
• data/images/cards/bottoms - these are only used if Pillow is installed. I think Pillow isn't used on the Kivy install - if it is, you can remove the cardset shadow files instead.
• data/images/cards/finder - this is only used by the find card feature, which isn't currently in the Kivy version
• data/images/cards/large and data/images/cards/small - these are legacy, and were replaced by the finder folder above, just need to confirm I didn't miss any references, then I can delete them.
• data/images/dialog - these are used by tkinter dialogs, and aren't needed by Kivy
• data/images/stats - this contains a background used by the statistics page - it looks like the Kivy version doesn't use this.
• data/images/tree - this contains images for tkinter's tree displays, and aren't needed by Kivy.
• data/themes - this contains tkinter theme data. Not sure if this is still used at all.

Those are little things, but they add up. Now there are a couple bigger things, but might need a bit more review/work:

• data/images/toolbar - there are multiple options for toolbar styles - I think anything smaller than the xlarge icons wouldn't be practical on Android. Also, the Kivy version doesn't currently have the option to change icon style, so remix light is the only style we'll need unless this option is added.
• data/tiles - I'm not sure why there are both GIF and PNG copies for each table tile - I'll look into that, but I think Kivy can't use GIFs? We could probably make a subset of table tiles to install on Android, as some of the more recent images are quite large. Taken to the extreme, "Felt_Green" is the default, and the only one absolutely needed. But if any table tiles are removed, we should account for an error if a user loses their currently selected table tile when they upgrade.
• data/cardsets - I can see three options here:
  1. We can create a "True Minimal" package, which only contains the absolute bare minimum cardsets needed to run PySol. The current minimal package contains a few older cardsets that are no longer defaults, but still kept for users who selected them in older versions and then upgraded. Just if we go this route, we'd have to find a way to gracefully handle the old cardsets that were lost in the upgrade.
  2. We can find a way to consolidate duplicate card images. There are many cardsets that are variants on existing cardsets, most notably the Neo cardsets that are the current defaults. These often share some images, so if we can write some code so Neo Tarock and Neo Hex use the matching images from the default Neo, we can remove several MB of duplicate files. I believe this can be done with symlinks, but those don't have cross platform support, so I'm not sure if they would work on Android, and even if they did, I would not be able to add them to the cardsets repo to avoid issues on other platforms.
  3. We can do both items 1 and 2 above.

Currently, I do have one additional type of cardset I'm working on right now, and two more have been requested (but probably won't be added anytime soon). We also received some image contributions in issue #342, which could lead to an option to select "Pause" and "Demo" text styles. I'd rather these didn't become a problem for the Android package.

Sorry for the huge wall of text. Just let me know your thoughts, and I am willing to help out if needed.

[lufebe16]

Thanks for the detailed suggestions. To say the actual apk size is not a problem. Its comparable with the actual size of firefox and chrome browser.

So there is no need to change something or to introduce complicated storage save features. My wish is only, if adding new big images (e.g. for 4K screens), they should be placed into a new folder. So they can be filtered off in the android/apk build process.

Here are my results of unpacking the current apk: (gif images have been excluded in this version. This saved about 1M)

Apk-size is ~86M (zipped) contains mainly:

libs: 44M (binaries of python, sdl and others, 32 and 64 bit versions) assets: 56M (zipped) contains mainly:

pysollib: 11M (the compiled python code of Pysol) data: 69M contains:

biggest entries in data: 16M: tiles where: 15M: save-asspect (big jpg-images) 8.9M: cardset-neo-tarock 6.7M: html 6.3M: images 4.9M: cardset-neo 4.4M: cardset-neo-hex 2.5M: data/images/cards/finder

With cardsets there is still the problem that newest Versions on Sourceforge do not match to the actual developer versions. Well for the time beeing I can fetch the PySolFC-Cardsets repo directly and then filter out, what is needed. Download size the is ~190M, out of it used about 40M.

[joeraz]

Okay, for the tiles, I've added subfolders separating the 4K table tiles from the normal HD and SD tiles. I was given one more 4K image, so currently, the tiles folder is 24MB, but if you remove the 4K subfolder, it goes down to about 4MB. So if you just filter out the "save-aspect-4k" and "stretch-4k" subfolders, I think that should give you what you need. I know "stretch-4k" doesn't currently exist, but it may get added at some point, depending on what other table tiles are donated, so it's probably best to account for it now.

For cardsets, the higher res cardsets aren't really intended for 4K. For them, it's more that the older cardsets look dated, and could turn users off, whereas the higher res cardsets look great when scaled to pretty much any screen size.

[lufebe16]

Thanks. This will help to select or adapt these type of images, when building the apk if needed.

[joeraz]

No problem.

Please close this ticket when you're done with it.

[shlomif]

Using .webp and similar formats in the packaging (instead of JPEG or PNG) might help too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP .

[lufebe16]

There are currently AFAIK no tablets nor smartphones in the world that have a 4k display (and also no human eyes that could benefit of it). I decided to reduce them all to 2k before building the apk.