Capacitor: 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

• [x] Android
• [ ] iOS
• [ ] electron
• [ ] web

OS of the development machine

• [ ] Windows
• [x] 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 ([email protected])
   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.