Why is Google maps 48M on Android 4.4.4 and 125M on Android 5.1.1? Why is Google maps only 48 Megabytes on Android 4.4.4, but is 125M on Android 5.1.1?  The Android 5.1.1 phone seems to have a 32-bit processor and the 4.4.4 phone seems to have a 64-bit processor from devicespecifications.com.  I would think the 64-bit phone would have the larger binary.
If you have root access, you can browse /data/app and that's the difference.


# Sample for Android K 4.4
com.android.vending-1.apk
com.google.android.apps.maps-1.apk

# Sample for Android L 5.0/5.1
com.android.vending-1/
com.google.android.apps.maps-1/


And if you list the content of one of them, you'll see


com.google.android.apps.maps-1/:
base.apk (54MB)
lib/

com.google.android.apps.maps-1/lib/:
arm64/

com.google.android.apps.maps-1/lib/arm64/:
libcronet.59.0.3602.4.so    (4.9MB)
libgmm-jni.so    (9.4MB)


Also, Android 4.4 implements the old Dalvik VM, while on Android 5+, Google switched to a new VM called ART. The main difference is that Dalvik compiles apps Just-In-Time (JIT), while ART compiles Ahead-Of-Time (AOT), so more code is compiled in ART than in Dalvik. That's why this one is really big:

/data/dalvik-cache/arm64/data@app@com.google.android.apps.maps-1@base.apk@classes.dex    (109.5MB)

On Android 4.4 it's much smaller, you can find it out by yourself.