Compare Apks with package level differences and sharable reports
2 min readJan 4, 2021
So a lot of times, we need to get a detailed report of the size differences between releases. Analysing this difference is easy. Our options include:
- Drag & drop apk file to Android Studio and use tool to compare with any previous apk. But it just tells the file by file differences and hard to play with dex files and it’s not easy to share this observation in case someone asks.
To make our devs life easy, I had created this Apk-Size-Analyzer.
Now, with beta-2 release, this includes the capability to compare 2 apks.
So how this fare compared to the tool in Android Studio?
- First, this uses the same tool to compare APKs. So you can expect the results to be the same.
- This gives additional info about the changes in source code/java packages which greatly helps to know what code caused the size differences and helps in the greater analysis.
- This is a command-line tool and thus can be easily used in any CI/CD pipelines and can be used to monitor changes early in development stages.
- This generates multiple reports like raw JSON (can be used according to need or in some other system), single-page HTML file which can be hosted anywhere and pdf report which can be easily shared anywhere.
- This tool is highly configurable and there are lots of variables which can be changed to reduce noise according to your needs.
It has lots of benefits and can be in lots of scenarios. The project is open-source and we gladly accept any PR/issues to make this even better.
