Does the Google Play store prepare several types of apk (with removed unnecessary resources)?

Issue

I'm taking about preparing by google store different versions of apk with resources adequate for our phone DPI/size. It didn't when I started programming on Android 4 years ago. Has anything changed? I can see that my apk downloaded from Google Play has smaller size than apk uploaded to the store. Is it because of improved compression algorithm or maybe they added removing unnecessary resources? If yes, any official source? I didn't find anything about this.

Solution

At the moment Google Play does not optimize the app by removing unnecessary resources, though this may happen in future. What you are seeing is almost certainly compression or patching, which you can read about in this blog post.

If you want to make sure you can take advantage of future optimizations in this space you should opt-in to Google Play app signing for your app.

Answered By - Nick Fortescue