[derefr]

The 80/20 solution here is to just find the few files that take up the largest amount of space and are clearly pointless to your app, and remove them. The USB hwdb, for example. Also, trimming down the timezone and locale DBs to just the ones your app runs on (hopefully UCT and UTF-8) should help—unless your app has to deal with data containing user-defined datetimes/charsets.

The other interesting thing to try, if your app's problem isn't so much library-dependencies but instead Unix shell dependencies, is to use a Busybox base image. Apps whose runtimes are already sandboxed VMs, especially, usually work great under Busybox: the JVM, Erlang's BEAM VM, etc.