SQLiteAssetHelper数据库文件大小

Question

I have an app that includes a pre-populated sqlite database, encoded in UTF-8. DB file size is 170 MB. I am using SQLiteAssetHelper to manage the database

Considering most Android Apps are less than 50MB, it is quite large. My current app size according to the Settings is 238MB.

Is there any way to make the downloadable app size smaller when user downloads it from Store? I have read that you can zip the sqlite database, but I haven't tried that yet. Will that make the app's download size smaller? Are there any other better options?

I am concerned about the app's download size, not the storage space. I do need the app to work offline, so web service is not an option.

Answer 1

Is there any way to make the downloadable app size smaller when user downloads it from Store?

Have a smaller database.

Will that make the app's download size smaller?

Since the APK is already a ZIP file, no, as ZIPping an entry in a ZIP file will not reduce its size further.

Are there any other better options?

You could not use SQLiteAssetHelper , and download the database on the first run of your app. Or, you could not use SQLiteAssetHelper and look into using APK expansion files. Neither of those will change the number of bytes to be downloaded, but they will reduce the overall disk space your app takes up a bit. You can use tools like command-line unzip to see how much space your database file is taking up in the APK (my one test app's database is 89% compressed and so takes up 568 bytes instead of the uncompressed 5120 bytes). This space is non-recoverable, insofar as you have no way of deleting a database from assets/ . Assuming a similar compression ratio, your 170MB database will take up an extra ~17MB on disk from the copy in assets/ .

You could also not have the 170MB database on the device at all, and have your app work with some Web service to access a hosted copy of the database. This won't work offline, of course.

Answer 2

I ended up using text files for the major lookup tables in my database. I added them in the assets folder, along with the smaller sqlite db. I kept only the small tables that I needed to do inserts/adds in the sqlite db.

And I was also able to easily encrypt the data in the file (which is not easy to do in sqlite)

I had to create indexes to index the file data, and used binary search to find by key or value.

That shortened the apk size, and it's about 30 MB now. Before it was about 76MB. and the app size was > 200 MB.