These packages certainly add bloat, and make it hard to fit under 1MB (can't really do it if a hello world is 1.5MB), but developers are adding a lot of their own bloat to get to 50 MB.

That said, Google could have (and probably should have) done a better job for Play store downloads with common libraries, especially common libraries they provide. They also could and should do a better job on translation strings -- the translation file must be stored uncompressed in the apk, because it wants to be memory mapped.

Last year I was invited to interview at Google Aarhus for a job on exactly this topic. We discussed fun, very simple ways to avoid including loads unused library code, and I was told that they already had some ridiculously efficient, practical way of compressing translation strings. I was there last November, and I had the impression that a lot of low hanging fruit would be picked off very quickly. Not sure what parts of this work actually shipped in these last 11 months. But work may still be ongoing.

At this point, I don't think there is anything simple you can do for translations in Android. Some of the translations are loaded outside of app context, and app developers may not know which ones those are. Allowing the files to be compressed in the apk would require support in the Android system, and there are a billion devices already shipped that don't know how to do that.

If you can tell what strings need to be in the old way and what can be done differently, you could do any number of easy things to compress the strings that don't need to be accessible by the system.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the only way to get a reasonable baseline, given that Google has no way to actually update Android devices.

No, the libs could be shared between apps, with at most one per API level, and shipped through the Play Store. If you want your app to work without Play Store, bundle the libs like today.

So, basically the Visual C++ Redistributable[1] but for Android? Seems to work well for Windows, from what I can tell.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_C%2B%2B

They already have one distributed through the Play Store. That's the proprietary bits. The Support libs are open source, they can work without the Play Store, and different apps can have different versions of it.

Yes, and they can ship a shared version of the open source libs (like the system webview). And as I specified, with one per API level (different versions). Maybe that would force them to have better QA of those libs as well.