Useful Links

Reducing APK size

• Reduce your app size
• Strategies To Reduce Flutter App Binary Size
• Minify android app but do not obfuscate it

Code Optimization

• Code Optimization with Proguard and R8 in Android
• The Unofficial R8 Documentation
• Adopt optimizations incrementally
• the dependency-analysis-gradle-plugin can help detecting unused dependencies, duplicate class files, and more
• Android Resources Checker: check your project for unused resources to trim down APK size (Python)

Security

• How to keep your key safe and what measures to take for the event of loss?
• Signing Key Rotation
• Sign your commits
• Network security configuration

Push Notifications

we recommend the use of UnifiedPush – which is an open standard for push notifications that rely on web push. It allows having efficient „real-time“ notifications, on-par with FCM. Also see Push Notifications here on our website.

• libraries implementing UnifiedPush
• android-embedded_fcm_distributor as fallback for those not having any UP distributor app installed on-device

Replacements for proprietary libraries

• many of GMS' features are covered by microG, see the implementation status here.
• for many Firebase features, there are replacements. Examples include:
  • appwrite provides database, auth, storage and more (BSD-3-Clause); see e.g. this appwrite-example for a quick intro
  • Clorabase provides database, storage, push notifications and more (MIT license)
  • Supabase provides database, auth, storage and more (Apache-2.0 license)
• for alternatives to Google Maps libraries, take a look at this page in the OSM Wiki

Also see Replacing proprietary libraries here on our website.

How to find out what dragged in a proprietary library?

• gradle :app:dependencies (show gradle dependency tree)
• flutter pub deps (show Flutter dependency tree)
• npm list (show NodeJS dependency tree, see How to view the dependency tree of a given npm module?)
• yarn why mime-db (NPM: find out what dragged in a given module, see How to view the dependency tree of a given npm module?)

Also see How to exclude Gradle dependencies to simply exclude what is not needed (but test to make sure it's really not needed)

Miscellaneous

• Hey, Where Did These Permissions Come From?
  (TL;DR: check app/build/outputs/logs/manifest-merger-debug-report.txt)
• Removing Unwanted Manifest Permissions With tools:node
• using build flavors
• choose a license: SPDX license list / Codeberg recommendations
• Had your app named com.example.* and found out that's not the best idea? This one could help you fix it: Android-Package-Renamer