Why is Capacitor APK so much bigger than Cordova APK?

[moose4lord]

Description of the problem:
I have a small Ionic app I'm trying to migrate from Cordova to Capacitor, and I'm finding that the APK generated with Capacitor (using Android Studio to generate a signed APK) is quite a bit larger than my app built with Cordova. As a test I built the Ionic blank starter app both ways and with Cordova the APK is about 2MB, but with Capacitor the APK is about 4MB. Inspecting the APKs I see these differences:

                Cordova   Capacitor
                -------   ---------
classes.dex      66.8KB       1.4MB
resources.arsc    3.7KB     461.8KB

Am I missing some optimization step in the Capacitor build?

Affected platform

• Android
• iOS
• electron
• web

OS of the development machine

• Windows
• macOS
• linux

Other information:

Ionic:

   Ionic CLI                     : 5.2.7 (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/ionic)
   Ionic Framework               : @ionic/angular 4.8.1
   @angular-devkit/build-angular : 0.801.3
   @angular-devkit/schematics    : 8.1.3
   @angular/cli                  : 8.1.3
   @ionic/angular-toolkit        : 2.0.0

Capacitor:

   Capacitor CLI   : 1.1.1
   @capacitor/core : 1.1.1

Cordova:

   Cordova CLI       : 9.0.0 (cordova-lib@9.0.1)
   Cordova Platforms : android 8.0.0
   Cordova Plugins   : cordova-plugin-ionic-keyboard 2.2.0, cordova-plugin-ionic-webview 4.1.1, (and 4 other plugins)

Utility:

   cordova-res : 0.6.0 
   native-run  : 0.2.8 

System:

   Android SDK Tools : 26.1.1
   NodeJS            : v12.9.1 (/usr/local/bin/node)
   npm               : 6.10.2
   OS                : macOS Mojave
   Xcode             : Xcode 10.3 Build version 10G8

Capacitor version: 1.1.1

node version: 12.9.1

npm version: 6.10.2

CocoaPods version:

Steps to reproduce:
Build the Ionic blank starter app

Link to sample project:

[jcesarmobile]

Capacitor includes cordova-android for the plugin compatibility, also ships with a set of plugins. Some of them have dependencies to android support libraries and push plugin has FCM dependency, while you install plugins separately in Cordova apps.

[moose4lord]

OK, I see Capacitor has quite a big selection of built-in APIs. Unfortunately, I have no use for most of them. Can the unused ones be disabled, or are they considered an integral part of Capacitor? I try hard to minimize bundle sizes and including a bunch of stuff that my app doesn't need seems counterproductive.

[ionitron-bot]

Thanks for the issue! This issue is being locked to prevent comments that are not relevant to the original issue. If this is still an issue with the latest version of Capacitor, please create a new issue and ensure the template is fully filled out.