117x Faster and Free: The Android Video Compressor That Has No Business Being This Good

The Macro: The Play Store Has a Garbage Problem

Android runs on roughly 70% of smartphones globally. That number has held steady for years and is projected to tick up toward 71–73% in the near future, according to multiple market analysts. That’s an enormous surface area for utility apps.

Go looking for a video compressor on the Play Store, though, and what you find is a parade of apps that treat “free” as a legally protected fiction. Ad interstitials. Paywalled export settings. Subscription prompts for features that have lived in open-source libraries since approximately forever.

This isn’t a compression technology problem.

FFmpeg has been free and ferociously capable for over two decades. HandBrake, often cited as the gold standard desktop alternative, is open-source and does the job well. The tooling exists. What’s been missing on Android specifically is a native app that uses it without bolting on a monetization layer that punishes you for wanting to shrink a video file.

The alternatives worth naming: HandBrake (desktop only), VideoLAN, Wondershare UniConverter (fine, but it costs money and it knows it). On mobile Android, the top Play Store results for “video compressor” are, and this is not a compliment, largely the same app wearing different icon colors. None of them are particularly fast. None of them are particularly honest about what’s actually free.

So the market context for Compressor isn’t really about compression at all. It’s about whether anyone will bother doing the obvious thing well, for free, without an agenda. That’s a lower bar than it sounds. Somehow it keeps not getting cleared.

The Micro: Kotlin, No Ads, and a Benchmark That Raises Eyebrows

Compressor is a native Android app, written entirely in Kotlin, using Media3 transformer pipelines under the hood. It compresses video files. That’s the whole pitch. It does not want your email address.

The headline claim is a 117x speed figure: 11 seconds versus 21 minutes compared to the top Play Store result for “video compressor.”

That’s a specific number. The kind of specific number that either holds up or becomes the thing people remember sarcastically. The benchmark conditions aren’t detailed in the available materials, so “117x faster” should be read as a strong directional claim rather than a certified lab result. Whether it survives contact with a 2019 mid-range device is a different question entirely.

What is verifiable: the GitHub repo exists, it’s public under MIT license, it has 287 stars and 11 forks at time of writing, and the code is actually there to read. Open-source video utility apps with real repos and MIT licenses are a different category of trust than a random APK from a developer with three reviews and a privacy policy hosted on a Carrd site.

The feature set is intentional in its restraint. Presets, target size targeting, no bloat. Skipping subscriptions, ads, and paywalls is a product decision with real tradeoffs. Buy Me a Coffee is the listed funding mechanism, which is charmingly low-pressure and also not a business model.

It got solid traction on launch day on Product Hunt, which for a free Android utility with no marketing budget is a reasonable signal.

The Verdict

Compressor is not overhyped. It’s actually underselling itself by leading with a speed benchmark that sounds like a bar bet. The more durable case is simpler: it’s free, open-source, native, and built by someone who was annoyed enough by the Play Store alternatives to write their own. That’s a legitimate origin story for a good utility.

The 30-day question is whether 117x survives contact with a diverse range of Android hardware. If it does, this becomes recommendable without caveats. If testers start finding it’s 117x faster specifically on whatever device the benchmark was run on, that conversation will happen loudly in the GitHub issues.

The 60-to-90-day question is sustainability.

MIT license, no monetization, one developer. That’s a single point of failure dressed as a philosophy. The open-source part is the actual hedge. If the original developer loses interest, forks can survive it. That’s worth more than it sounds.

What I’d want to know before fully endorsing it: benchmark methodology, minimum Android version support, and whether the Media3 transformer handles edge cases without silently mangling them. Portrait video, HEVC, files from third-party camera apps. If those hold up, this is the easy answer to a question people ask constantly. Right now it’s very promising and slightly unverified. For a free app with public source code, that’s already a better deal than almost anything else in its category.