A new out-of-box “Empty Activity” app project in Android Studio compiles to a 1.59 KB APK (if implemented in Java; it goes up to 2.26 MB APK with Kotlin). Rip out the dependencies on AndroidX, and the APK size plummets to 103 KB. (The APK for the de-Appcompat'd Kotlin version is, correspondingly, 709 KB.) 1.5 MB overhead – fifteenfold – for a more convenient layout[0] and the Material theme. Mind-numbingly wasteful. In a big enough app, that overhead will be overshadowed by the size of the meaningful bits, but how many apps really get that big? How many games include Appcompat and then draw their own UI anyway?

[0]: https://developer.android.com/training/constraint-layout