I have 2 apps that are soundboards and their APK’s are right around 50MB. I used the Appbrain Apptimiser and one of the warnings was to reduce the size of my APK. It said “The smaller your apk, the fewer people will abandon downloading it.” Has anyone found this to be true? Does it matter the APK is large?
When I am a user on Google Play I often take note of the .apk file size. While it won’t bother a lot of people when they are on wi-fi, it might be a big problem on mobile data (depending on what county).
Make the .apk smaller wherever possible.
Out of interest, why are your sound board apps so large? Are you compressing to .ogg format for the audio files?
No, they are all in .wav format. I’ll look into converting to .ogg, I didn’t even think of that. Wow, I just did 1 file and it’s 1/10th the size! Thanks for the tip.
… … use compression mate … … 
Also for phones and tablets you can use quite a low quality setting for ogg (1 or 2 and use mono if you can) and no one will tell the difference since the speakers are really small and usually mono.
The .apk size does matter a lot! 50mb is really excessive, you should be try to keep it below 5mb
You can use Audacity which is free too. You can actually control the quality level which affects the format’s file size too. Even on setting “0” (0-10) the files still sound good and you’re cutting the file size down to tiny levels.
Isn’t .mp3 even smaller than .ogg? Why not use .mp3?
ogg offers much better quality for the same file size - especially for high compression levels - and mp3 is less suported by libraries/frameworks/devices.
I’ve been using Audacity but didn’t know about these settings. When I made the audio recordings, the default is in .wav, so I just left them like that.
Do remember that iphone won’t play .ogg files so stick to mp3 if you plan to release ios version of app.
Right now i’m just releasing for Android but should I use mp3 for Android and IOS or stick to .ogg for Android and mp3 for IOS?
Use ogg on Android and mp3 on iOS. Should be easy to maintain (I personally wrote a script for myself that converts my source files - FLAC or WAV - to mp3 and ogg for my Android and iOS folders).
The biggest complaints I get on large apk’s is that they take to long to download, users are impatient, while they wait for your awesome app to download they have plenty of time to give you that one star and tell you how you ruined their life by making them waiting 30 seconds for the app to download!