Android builds are HUGE and getting larger

With everything stripped and removed
15 MB for a Fat build; Arm7 and x86 in one apk
8 MB for an empty Arm7 APK

This is roughly 1MB more then the previous version.

Thoughts?

Unity is solving some parts of the issue, and this part looks promising
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/02/in-the-labs-custom-build-configurations/

I also hope they switch to a modular design for most of the current Unity Core items.
This way we could strip unused modules or replace large modules with smaller versions that only do what we need for a specific project.

 

Let me understand this, you are saying Unity 5 Android builds increased by 1mb?

 

So what, every new MB is one too much. I prefer it to have it as small as possible, and 8MB for an empty project is not good at all. There are still people out there who care about file sizes.

 

There really is a problem here with Unity 5. My project - single open-world scene, 100-150k vertices, statically lightmapped at low/mid res - went from an APK of ca. 34Mb to 72Mb! Startup on my Nexus 5 went from about 3.5 seconds to over 13 seconds, and framerate dropped from 55 fps to 45.

Android support Unity 5 is currently pre-alpha, it's simply not usable yet...

 

I have had no trouble running my projects.
Some are just simple 3D scenes like for my ImagePicker plugin, others much more complex with realtime procedural mesh / texture generations and multiple lights in deferred rendering.

Be sure to check the new build settings though. You might also want to look at the build data in the editor log (build report tool is currently not working for me, Unity 5 broke a lot in the API).

I would recommend checking the build type and set it to Arm7 as that was what unity 4.5 / 4.6 supported.
This should cut your code and dll size in half.

Next up check the skybox, the new one is awesome, but the default adds a textured cubemap (textures are one of the main space hogs).

This should help but the main size increase for me is still the unity core library's, which when dealing with a 100 MB project is fine, when dealing with a smaller then 100 KB plugin just makes things look really bloated.

 

Sounds worth a try, although I think its more likely that the new lightmaps can explain this big jump. Will try it as soon as Unity 5 lets me build again - right now, build towards Android and WebGL suddenly generates this error, although the DLL in question has no new references and also still works on v.4. Geez....