The Pokédex Is 2.4MB. My Users Never Download It.
A random Pokémon generator is a strange thing to optimize. The entire product is: press a button, get a Pokémon. But behind that one button sits the whole dataset of the franchise — 1,025 species across nine generations, an 18×18 type chart, hundreds of moves and abilities, and a learnset table for every single species. The naive versions of this app either hammer a public API on every click or…
The Pokédex, a collection of over 1,025 Pokémon species, weighs 2.4MB when downloaded. However, the author of the application responsible for delivering the Pokédex to users implemented a clever solution to minimize the data that needs to be downloaded. Instead of fetching data from an API each time a user interacts with the app, the entire dataset is compiled during the build step into a single, trimmed JSON file weighing 13MB.
This file contains just the fields necessary for displaying the Pokédex in the app, discarding unnecessary details such as URLs for sprite images and generation data. This approach significantly reduces the amount of data that users need to download, allowing for a faster and more efficient user experience.
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