如何减少自定义贴纸应用程序的文件大小

Question

I've built a custom iMessage sticker app that has hundreds of stickers and requires an in-app purchase to unlock them. As I'm adding more and more stickers, my app size is obviously increasing. I'm doing my best to compress images and keep the file size down but trying to think of other ways to keep a low file size.

I came across this sticker app:

Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mojilala-unlimited-10000+/id1153431461?mt=8&_branch_match_id=598750316922589452

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leo.stickers&hl=en

It has 42,000 stickers but the file size is only around 22MB. It works like a normal sticker app too, you can't tell a difference.

I'm very new to coding and have no idea what to even research to have something like this for my app. Could the stickers be hosted on a WordPress site and a link to the image be sent to the app somehow? Is this something Firebase could do?

Answer 1

I'm not sure how the above mentioned app works. But I think you can use the following approaches:

• Only add the free stickers to the app, and download the others from the server when user purchases it.
• Slightly different approach from the above one, add the low resolution thumbnails to the app. When user launches your app for the first time download the actual stickers in the background and show them after the successful download. Add some logic to check whether any new stickers available to download when your app is launched each time and act accordingly.

For iOS there are several methods to reduce the app size, please check this Technical Q & A

Answer 2

Use Firebase Cloud Storage to upload your stickers as images. You can download those images and display them in your app. Go through the Firebase Cloud Storage Documentation for the details.