“minifyEnabled” vs “shrinkResources” - what's the difference? and how to get the saved space?

Question

Background

According to the \"Resource Shrinking\" webpage of Andriod documentations (here), you can minimize the app\'s size via the build.gradle file, by using t

Answer 1

The answers to the questions 2 and 4 can be found in this video from Android Dev Summit 2015 along with some other useful information on this topic.

An overview of the points discussed were:

• shrinkResources is taken into account only if minifyEnabled is true

• minifyEnabled shrinks code, while shrinkResources shrinks resources that are not referenced from the code

• By default shrinkResources runs in safe mode. If you switch it to strict you can provide tools:keep and tools:discard flags manually to influence the resource shrinking.