Really wish the app store had a "only apps under 10MB" filter.
The fastest, least ad-filled and micropayment filled apps are usually the small ones. By downloading a 3 megabyte thermometer app you'll be much happier than a 150 megabyte thermometer app.
I remember there was a publisher in Play Store who had very small apps like single digit kb flashlight, sudoku, calender, etc. I can't find them now. Those apps were really small all within <200kb
Google Play probably kicked them off for not using latest Android SDK or something. So many tiny and high quality apps were lost.
I use the minesweeper, sudoku and solitaire apps from dustland design (search pub:Dustland Design) they're very minimalistic and clean.
There's also currency / unit converter and calendar by Sam Ruston which are in the same vein very good and clean.
https://simplemobiletools.com/index.html
The gallery app is superb.
f-droid is a great way to find bloat free apps
OpenIntents?
That reminds me of one reason I got out of mobile app development, totally forgot about until now
Often times the hiring managers wanted to see something more akin to a portfolio, like an art project, for apps that many times didn’t exist anymore or have a production server up anymore
But the more arbitrary metric was trying to be sure that I worked on anything “big”
And the 8-12 megabyte package sizes - which I spent a lot of time optimizing with many competence inspiring techniques - would signal that the app or service or userbase wasn't big. Which had nothing to do with anything, could have hundreds of millions of downloads and users
In that space there is a huuuge incentive for bloatware
I have never experienced nor heard of a hiring manager determining the outcome of a candidate based on the MB of an app they worked on. I would run away from working for a company like that.
Oh, does that manager also measure productivity in lines of code? And maybe even a movie by the amount of money spent?
I continue to be puzzled by how much smaller apps are on Android, ex. Took me 9 tries, including ads, to find a thermometer app over 7 MB. I've worked on both platforms for years and yet don't really know why. Only guess is Android has a much richer tradition of vector art over bitmaps, and Swift libraries had to be compiled in for years until ABI stability enabled using dynamic linking to OS ones
Publisher not also being a major hardware vendor helps :-|
(Only partly a joke, etc.)
The red flag for me is that they're all “free.”
Let me filter by apps that cost money, are ad free, and sometimes even: don’t have in-app purchases.
Aurora Store can at least filter by paid/IAP/has ads
> 150 megabyte thermometer app
Does such a thing really exist? Or are you just making a point?
For reference the first app I got on Apple App store (ignoring the ad result) for "thermometer" is > 100 MB. Looking at the first ~dozen only 1 comes in under the <10 MB category. The two biggest offenders of huge app sizes are shipping cross platform runtimes (the kind that tend to throw in the kitchen sink, not the kind that act as a thin layer) and tracking/analytics bloat.
How would this feature handle an update that increases the file size? What about apps that download assets after you install them?
Isnt this one of the world’s software ...why would a thermometer (for example) app need updating? And, would you let it?
Doesn't fstore have a filter for that?
Why, what's wrong with 172MB calculator app?
A calculator app doesn't need that many megabytes of code and assets to be a calculator app. So if an app is way bigger than it should be, it usually means one of two things (usually!):
1. The app was not very optimised, perhaps created by a novice, containing a lot of things it doesn't need.
2. The app used to be really small, but a lot of extra code was added to serve you ads, profile you for better targeting or do sneaky stuff you didn't ask for.
If a trip to the baker took 172 days, there would be over 171 used days to justify; if it took 172 engineers to change a lightbulb, it would have to be a very special lightbulb or explanations should be in order. Besides uses of concern of the extra resources spent, it simply just makes no sense.
Nothing, but it better have a fully featured computer algebra system baked in.
Whatever is in the extra 150MB. Ads, spyware, bloat, slow performance.
I would add an /i to keep your karma happy
People here are vaccinated against sarcasm it seems
Tangentially related, I once wrote a literature review on why people play Flappy Bird. I was a graduate student in game studies at the time. Ultimately, I never pursued the academic route, just sharing it for fun.
For the curious minds, here it is [1].
I have always felt there is something fascinating going on behind Flappy Birds' infamous difficulty curve that warrants deeper study.
On the one hand, there is no actual progression or ramping of difficulty in the game itself. The difficulty level remains the same whether your current score is 0 or 10 or 100. But every new highscore represents a new summit that the player has to scale. The first and maybe the most frustrating summit to scale is scoring a single point. To get your score into the double digits, the player has to have basic mastery of the core mechanics - including the precise physics, and timings- and learn how to handle a certain number of scenarios. The obstacles on the path to triple-digit territory and beyond seem almost self-imposed. The fear and tension as you approach your own highscore is the biggest impediment to breaking your highscore. Once you break that highscore - the hand tremors magically disappear the next time you approach it, only for it to re-appear as you near your new highscore.
All this, when the basic concept of the gameplay is deceptively simple. Like i said, there are many layers to unpack for someone who is willing to look into it.
Look at almost ANY arcade game of the 70s/80s. Most of them weren't designed with an end in mind. You play as long as you can for the accolades that come with posting your initials on the scoreboard.
Asteroids is a quintessential example - relatively flat difficulty curve once you've mastered the game - it really comes down to a test of the player's endurance. Scott Safran set a record game that lasted a grueling 60 hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Safran
EDIT: Anyone who has EVER tried for a high score (whether a personal best, or a world record) is familiar with the natural nervousness that increases in direct proportion to how close you are to breaking it. That's not a Flappy Bird thing, that's a literal every game thing. Go watch a live stream of a speed runner that's got a heart rate monitor attached to the feed for example.
Many early 80s 8-bit console games worked this way. I'm thinking of games like Transbot for the Sega Master System. There are a few different levels, with various enemy configurations and scenery, but it has no ending and goes on forever without any real changes.
This was the case for me with Flappy Bird and also that old Temple Run game circa 2011-ish.
It's almost more of a game of focus or how much you will _think_, because once you're distracted a bit and forget those physics or timing just one time, you're probably done.
Asking for a friend, are flappy bird’s levels always the same, or are the pipe heights/opening sizes random?
"It is surmised that conditioning is enforced via several cogni- tive biases that trick a player into expecting euphoria (liking- pathway), when instead frustration is yielded – with condi- tioning being iterated to a point that the player is motivated to interact with the game on a foremost instinctual level. We posit that these stimulations of the wanting-pathway may lead to players interacting with the game not only with- out actually liking it, but also without knowing why they are interacting with the game. Indeed, this calls for drawing another parallel between drug addiction, and play behaviour in which liking may be barely exhibited (cf. [16, 38, 40])."
Given that background, the odds you've never seen this are exceedingly low.
Nonetheless, and for the benefit of the Lucky 10,000, I must present: QWOP.
As an expert in Flappy Bird I Will tell it's because people love to approximate polynomials...
Thank you for sharing, great work!
Less than 4k loc.
457 android_native_app_glue.c
360 audio.c
802 game.c
201 init.c
93 main.c
39 mouse.c
38 shaders.c
229 texture.c
1377 upng.c
27 utils.c
3623 totalA student of mine had an assignment to write a game using SFML, they wrote a FlappyBird clone and it was like a few hundred lines of code. It's not a very complex program to write. To be honest, I think 4k is too much :)
3623 total - 1377 upng.c (3rd-party tiny PNG image decoding library) = 2246
To be fair, Android itself requires some level of fluff.
So does making the game work well in more than one device.
Are you including SFML loc in that total?
game.c is 800 odd lines. There are some optimizations you could do here and there (e.g load digit sprites in an array to avoid the switch case 1/2/3... stuff).
The bulk of the 3000 is fluff that you need because this is C on Android, not SFML.
A shame that 4k loc compiles to over 100k of binary size.
It compiles to 37kb of 32bit code and to 48kb of 64bit code.
/lib/arm64-v8a/libflappybird.so 48kb
/lib/armeabi-v7a/libflappybird.so 37kb
assets: 29kb
icon: 3kb
signature: 12kb
It doesn't. The total APK size is less than 100k, including images and sounds.
actually including both architectures: armeabi-v7a + arm64-v8a
to check:
- dependencies statically compiled-in
- debug symbols
I did something similar in Nim and published it in 2020 (less pretty graphics however). The difference is that I went deeper and actually wrote an assembler for the Dalvik bytecode and .apk files:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr9X5NCwPlI&list=PLxLdEZg8DR...
The code in the repo has unfortunately bitrotten. I am sometimes thinking to try and resurrect it Some Day™... from time to time I think of some simple app I could write if it was a bit more polished.
Really cool! I just love seeing Android apps that weight less than a 1MB and run anywhere, even on your old HTC.
Congrats!
Also an assessment of speed gains would be nice.
I was under de impression java gluing was required to create Android APKs. Really nice to see this project. 0 java files. Bravo.
Also worth looking at the rawandroid project like others noted: https://github.com/cnlohr/rawdrawandroid/tree/master
The reason you have Java glue instead of C glue in most cases is that Java's is easier to write. Whatever you do, you need a Activity instance to run, and while you can create one from C, it requires a lot of boilerplate that is mostly taken care of by inheritance in Java. Here's how it's done in plain C: https://github.com/VadimBoev/FlappyBird/blob/master/FlappyBi... https://github.com/VadimBoev/FlappyBird/blob/master/FlappyBi...
Also even the "pure" C one depends on Java, because Activities exist only on the Java side of Android.
In practice to be usable on a standard Android system, native code must always be compiled to a shared object, with JNI entry points to be called from Java userspace.
The only option is to write such native methods ourselves, or use one of the two predefined Activities for NDK that already expect specific functions to be present on the shared library.
Additionally, the zero Java part only works, if what NDK exposes as stable API is enough, and from Google's point of view, that is only for games, or faster compute, everything else requires JNI fun.
As tip, it is easier to deal with Android IPC for Java <-> NDK communication, than going through JNI boilerplate.
Couldn't one simply make the boilerplate once, as a library, that takes the pertinent bits as arguments? In which case if your app is C anyways it would make sense to just keep it simple with that.
Super Mario Bros was just 40KB
It was also made to work on exactly one hardware specification, with no operating system to speak of. This flappy bird clone works on an immeasurable number of devices, with varying hardware AND software configurations!
Cosmo gives you what you described above and it’s <10kb
Missed opportunity: name it Floppy Bird since it fits on a 3.5 inch floppy disk.
That came to mind for me too, but unfortunately the name has already been taken by a few clones; the most notable being a trivial reskin that uses a floppy disk icon instead of a bird.
here in argentina everyone calls it 'floppy beard'. and of course 'angry birds' is 'ongry beards'
Could this technique, using rawdrawandroid to write C applications for Android, also use raylib (and other C frameworks)?
And maybe could this developing system be used through Termux, to have a C development environment on Android for Android?
Yes, raylib does support android. I have a slightly incomplete build script I use for my raylib projects (obviously you need to take better care of signing, you probably want to build for other targets besides aarch64, your SDK is probably not installed in /home/denis, and I'm not sure whether I'm adding .so files to apk in a way modern android prefers, but it still works).
https://gist.github.com/deniska/f1ee73e18e1444eb724c01f933b6...
"For Android" implies Java is usable, and bytecode can be very dense, so IMHO this could be even smaller.
There's a Flappy Bird clone for the GameBoy, in the form of a 32kB ROM. [0][1][2]
This isn't to downplay this Android-based project though. They aren't claiming to have written the most compact Flappy Bird clone.
[0] https://laroldsjubilantjunkyard.itch.io/flappy-bird-gameboy/...
[1] https://laroldsjubilantjunkyard.itch.io/flappy-bird-gameboy
I'm honestly surprised at the 100k figure. In my mind it should be possible go far lower. 10k sounds vaguely realistic.
if you're willing to compromise on the graphics and just get the core gameplay, I reckon you could do it in a 512 byte x86 bootsector.
Nice codebase . That's some if the best looking C I've seen in a while.
Nothing special. Many inconsistencies, e.g. inconsistent variable naming (mixes snake camelCase and PascalCase). What kind of codebases are you looking at? I have seen way better ones. https://git.zx2c4.com has better. OpenBSD is great, too.
That's amazing! I wish there was something like rawdrawandroid for Rust.
Same, would like to see the same but implemented in Rust
It is refreshing, and nice to see programs/games/apps that are "crafted" vs just slapped together out of existing, bloated third party components.
Interesting to see what a Windows-based project looks like. I haven't used Windows for ages. Seeing the .bat files and vsproj files gave me nostalgic feelings.
This reminds me of code golf, an activity I had some good fun with as a young teen.
Coincidentally, one of my first contributions to the community was a low fidelity "flappy bird" clone in less than 0.5 kb of javascript. Maybe someone will find fascination in my old hobby and its surrounding community:
Do you still accept more optimizations? :-) I believe there are tons of mechanical substitutions that can be made there, for example `i%17?r+=z:r+='|\n|'+z` should simplify into `r+=i%17?z:'|\n|'+z`.
If constrained by size of result rather source you get sizecoding, a generalization of demoscene.
I see RenderTexture() is creating and uploading to GLBuffer every frame, is that ok for performance?
https://github.com/VadimBoev/FlappyBird/blob/bf3287d90d93ec0...
I think what's interesting about reading code like this is that it's just not very complicated. You might go in there expecting to see some kind of complicated code golf or some fancy tricks to keep file size down. But as always it's just a matter of writing simple, understandable code and just being a little thoughtful.
Great work! Good to see what only it takes to run on Android! On the other hand it also shows how much comes "for free" or made easier by using the provided sdks. For example volume control doesn't work while running this. Also resuming the game after switching away. Maybe that's relatively easy to save and restore state, though.
You should check out .kkrieger an fps game in 96kb. A relic from the demoscene.
i realised recently, there is a correlation between the file size of a game and how likely i am to enjoy it.
the smaller the file size the more likely i am to enjoy it. and the opposite is true.
i think part of it is time investment. having less time. i dont see much value in 60gb of 4k graphics textures.
pac man on the atari or snes is maybe less than 100kb, while modern pac man could be easily 10gb or more. same for tetris or any game with the same gameplay that hasn't changed much.
I totally support this!
Coincidentally I wrote a small 2048-inspired game just recently, it's under 13 KiB (zipped; the "real" file is about 30 KiB): https://js13kgames.com/2024/games/king-thirteen
If you're interested to check it out, please tell me what you think :)
I got a GOTY 2023 for my game YOYOZO which is just 39KB and includes custom physics, online high scores, two music tracks, and more. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936
>pac man on the atari or snes is maybe less than 100kb
Off by an order of magnitude! Pac-man sizes:
4K: Atari 2600 (it's bad)
8K: Atari 800
16K: Atari 800 Ms. Pac-Man
24K: Original arcade machine (Z80)
You'll love Desert Golfing then.
NESert golfing is better...
Animal Well is 33 MB and is absolutely great
The game I like most is a multiplayer immersive reality game in 0 bytes called frogger, where I'm the frog.
Beat that! ;)
So this is an android apk, and not a Linux app that just happens to run on android? I'd really be curious as to why most android apps are huge...
I made a sub-100k Android app once (I am now banned from the Play Store, and I should be lucky they didn't delete my Gmail account too) and every time I opened the IDE (Android Studio at the time) it would automatically add a Google "support library" to the project that Google obviously wanted to force me to use. If I forgot to remove it and built the app, it would be closer to 10MB. So that was the minimum size of almost every Android app at the time.
Most Android apps are huge because they bundle tons of assets just to accommodate the “initial experience of the user”. Also, using bloat libraries and frameworks (any shipped by Google), increase the apk size.
Nowadays Google offers a solution for this problem called app bundling. It’s especially good if you build a mono app that behaves differently in certain regions. Instead of delivering a raw apk, you deliver a region specific app bundle.
I'm unaware of any apps that behave totally differently in different regions.
Sure - there are sometimes a few disabled features in one region or another, but is that really worth shipping a totally different binary for?
Even language packs can be tiny even for 200+ languages if they're pure text.
It's only when you get language/region specific artwork that there's a problem.
This is impressive, especially that it's fully in C.
I'm wondering, can you debug C apps on Android?
Android Studio allows you to debug Java, C/C++ or dual Java and C/C++ apps.
Possibly through Termux... Surely for shell commands, I would say; I am not sure about hooking the debugger to a package
isn't this kind of what Flutter is? a (relatively big) framework to just draw frames to a barebones Android app.
On a technicality, yes, but I think most developers who use it do so because of the large collection of React-style user interface components which are built into it. Now that Jetpack Compose exists (which allows for traditional Java-based widgets to be used in a 'reactive' way), personally I don't see any reason to use Flutter. That 'drawing directly' aspect puts Flutter apps several years behind in terms of performance, accessibility and reliability, since pretty much everything in the Android API needs to be reimplemented in Dart.
Too fast on my Samsung A52s
Seems this was fixed in https://github.com/VadimBoev/FlappyBird/commit/f57a3ec90078b... by forcing the gameloop to be 60fps.
It's a simple solution, but does mean that things are effectively capped at 60fps. The techniques in https://gafferongames.com/post/fix_your_timestep/ could be used to properly allow variable fps while maintaining constant physics speed.
Add it to Fdroid
This game is legend.
Why so many bytes? I wrote one using just 141 bytes and it took just few seconds to write, and it is the first functional game I've ever written). Result: https://claude.site/artifacts/3b35069f-4d51-4415-9f58-69988c...
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not, but there's no actual graphics in this besides a yellow ball and green rectangles, while the OP game has actual textured pipes, a textured floor, a background scene. The score counter looks to use a basic system or browser font, while the OP game has a custom font. The OP game has also high score tracking, sharing, a proper main screen instead of just dropping you into gameplay.
It's a haha-only-serious joke about using a prompt to write it. Sort of impressive it's even that far along, but OP's effort is far more interesting to me
That was a 20 megabyte page load for me even with all the ad cruft blocked...to load a game in a browser, which is already the most batteries-included application platform I can think of.
nice! but how big is the .apk?