1266156 - Investigate cruncherEnabled for AAPT PNG optimization

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox Build System :: Android Studio and Gradle Integration, defect)

Description

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Sebastian pointed out an article:
  https://medium.com/@duhroach/smaller-pngs-and-android-s-aapt-tool-4ce38a24019d#.ukj81d97r

It mentions that AAPT's optimization tool can actually increase the size of PNGs if you've already optimized your PNGs beforehand (which we do). You can disable the functionality with the "cruncherEnabled" flag. We should:
 * See what's currently running
 * Investigate twiddling the flag
 * See how it affects the produced APK

Note: who knows what moz.build is doing but let's focus on gradle because we'll drop moz.build (hopefully) soon.

Comment 1

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

Thanks for filing this!

Comment 2

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

Hey Krish. This is not directly related to downloadable content but APK size.

Can you build with gradle (front-end build) and compare the APK size with cruncherEnabled on/off (See blog posting in comment 0). Almost all our PNGs are optimized (see bug 1266057), so we are wondering if aapt will actually increase the size of the APK.

Comment 3

[k.krish]

Hey Sebastian,

Sure I will perform the necessary investigations and come back.

Comment 4

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

We were just talking about this on IRC and with a fx-team gradle build we see a ~100KB difference:
* Default build: 39240639 bytes
* With cruncher disabled: 39128721 bytes
(-111918 bytes / ~109KB)

Comment 5

[k.krish]

I built the code in my local machine and observed the following.

* Default Build - 3,93,53,420 bytes.
* With Cruncher disabled  - 3,92,41,478 bytes.

*Difference = 1,11,942 bytes which is - ~111KB.

Comment 6

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

Great. This matches my observations.

It would be interesting to know if we can disable this when running aapt manually (I think that's what our mach based build does) or if this is only available to gradle based builds.

Comment 7

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee didn't login in Bugzilla in the last 7 months.
:nalexander, could you have a look please?
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 8

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Anything here would be relevant to Fenix, which I'm quite sure will be optimizing image assets using modern toolchain techniques.