Is it safe to exclude libraries' assets (font in this case) from an Android Gradle build?

Question

As the title says, is it safe to exclude libraries assets from an Android Gradle APK build ?

One of the Google's libraries is importing a font (~7mb). Could this file be excluded safely to reduce APK size?

My current method to exclude files is to use an ignoreAssetsPattern statement:

android {
    ...

    buildTypes {
        ...

        release {
            ...

            aaptOptions {
                ignoreAssetsPattern '!NotoColorEmojiCompat.ttf:'
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

is it safe to exclude libraries assets from an Android Gradle APK build ?

Generally speaking, no. The library is expecting the asset to be there.

If you feel that you have sufficient test coverage, and so you feel comfortable that you are not using the feature of this library that requires this asset, you're welcome to try excluding it.

IMHO, a better solution is to figure out what library this is coming from (my guess: Jetpack's Emoji library) and remove your code that depends upon it, so you can then remove the whole library from the project.