Apr 2021
At work I convinced my team to switch from Crashlytics to Sentry. Sentry is just a far more complete tool, however, due to our target audience and just the android ecosystem in general, we are very careful regarding our app’s apk size. Every added mb has a negative impact on how many people download/sign-up in our app. After adding Sentry our app grew by almost 2 megabytes, which is a step prize for us.
So I spent a bit of time trying to see if there was anything that could be done about it. Eventually reading the issues on the sentry-android repo (which is a direct dependency of the react-native version of the Sentry library), some people mentioned that NDK support (the framework to write C/C++ in android) seems to add a lot of unnecessary files.
The documentation directly mentions that if you don’t need NDK support, you can switch your dependency from sentry-android to sentry-android-core. So I opened to node_modules/@sentry/react-native/android/build.gradle and changed the dependency there from sentry-android to sentry-android-core. Then saved a patch with patch-package.
Afterwards I simply built the app again (if you are doing local builds, you might want to run ./gradlew clean on your android folder to get rid of any caches), and it removes ~1.2 megabytes of the size of the app.
Oscar Franco