I am currently testing how to package and deploy a mobile project to an Android device. After painstakingly getting the device to work properly in development mode on my PC, I followed all the instructions on Reducing APK file size but nothing really seems to work. I disabled all the unnecessary plugins (nearly all of them), dropped dynamic lighting to 0 and ensured that Create compressed cooked packages was ticked. I was using the Top Down Template as the example does for Packaging Your Game but the file size is still at 107 MB on my device.
I followed the additional instructions on reducing APK size and started a blank project, only migrated over the UE Mannequin (which brought over a few animations and materials) and the game mode from the Third Person template. Repackaged it all and put it onto my Android. Again, the file size is 107MB with all the same aforementioned settings.
As a test, I ran both projects (the blank with migration and the original TP template) without the Compress Cooked Packages checked and deployed onto my device. Again, the file size was exactly the same size, 107MB.
I don’t know if this is a bug but it’s obvious that the compression isn’t working properly, or I’m doing something horribly wrong (which ticking a single box seems difficult to mess up.) I am packaging this as a shipping build, not development. I can’t mark it as Distribution because I have yet to get a Google Play store key/license so I don’t know if marking it as distribution build would make a difference or not but I don’t see why it would.
I am using 4.10.2 and this is a blueprints project/deployment. Seeing as Google has a 100MB limit on files for the Play store, it seems useless to consider UE4 as an option if a bare-bones project is already over that limit before anything substantial is even added to the game.
If anyone has any knowledge in this area, or has some ideas on what I can do to get my builds to compress in size, it would be greatly appreciated.