I recently published an upgrade to Wootsi Lite. This upgrade included many features and fixes, one of which was a move to the ActiveAndroid ORM. ActiveAndroid references the Android library. Because of this, when I exported a signed package for Wootsi, android.jar was being included in the apk. This added over 2mb to the apk. That doesn’t seem like much, but when you’re waiting for 2mb to download on your phone, it is.

I asked around, but couldn’t get any answers about fixing this. Finally I decided to remove it manually, and surprisingly it worked!

Here’s how I did it.

1. Export the signed package as you normally would.
2. Open the apk with 7zip, winrar, or something equivalent.
3. Delete android.jar from the file and save your changes.

That’s it!

This simple process reduced the file size by more than 2mb. My apk went from 2.8mb to 90k.