Small Findings
Short notes from side projects. Each one is something I measured or hit, not a general claim.
Godot 4.8 beta 2 makes my Android APK about 6 MB smaller
2026-11-02
Salt Line, my Rust + Godot artillery game, ships on Godot 4.7.2. I keep an opt-in CI job that exports the same project with both 4.7.2 and 4.8-beta2 and compares the results.
Both exports below use Godot's official export templates, for arm64 Android, with release builds. My shipping 4.7.2 build uses a stripped custom engine instead, so these aren't my store sizes. They do compare like with like.
| 4.7.2 | 4.8-beta2 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salt Line APK | 90,869,703 B | 84,594,405 B | −6,275,298 B (−6.9%) |
libgodot_android.so in the APK | 71,114,944 B | 64,818,536 B | −6,296,408 B (−8.9%) |
libsalt_line_godot.so (my Rust GDExtension) in the APK | 6,077,720 B | 6,077,720 B | 0 B |
Almost all of the drop is the engine library. My own native library is byte-for-byte the same size. So the savings come from Godot, not from anything I changed.
Not everything got smaller. The Linux x86_64 release export grew by 3,135,744 B (78.6 MB → 81.7 MB), the same amount as the official Linux template grew. I haven't looked into what changed in the engine on either platform.
The numbers come from one CI run (41565869845) against 4.8-beta2 commit cafc17a19. Betas change, so I'll measure again at the release candidate.
The export that didn't build at first
The first 4.8 Android export failed in Gradle:
GodotApp.java:49: error: cannot find symbol
symbol: variable FLAVOR
location: class BuildConfig
4.8 moved com/godot/game/GodotApp.java to com/godot/game/app/GodotApplication.java. My build script unpacked the 4.8 Android build template over the 4.7.2 one that the job had just used, so the old GodotApp.java stayed behind and was compiled against 4.8's Gradle project.
The fix was to delete android/build before unpacking the template (saltline#144). If you switch Godot versions in one checkout and see a strange Java error in the Android export, check for files left over from the old template.