CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xamarinxamarin.android
Brandon Tripp
Brandon Tripp

Reputation: 277

Which Xamarin ABIs should we support

Currently our Xamarin Android app (PCL) is huge in my opinion, even in release mode. I suspect it is due to supported architectures. Currently we have them all selected. Does anyone know if we have to select all of these? We are not using the Android NDK at all as well.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2067

Answers (2)

hvaughan3
hvaughan3

Reputation: 11105

I will copy part of my answer from here.

Make sure you are at least checking the following architectures: armeabi-v7a and x86. You could do the other three but we do not since we use LLVM compiling in release mode, which is not compatible with the 64 bit architectures (except for armeabi, which is deprecated). The good thing about that is that all of the 64 bit architectures can still use 32 bit builds so they all still get covered if you check those 3.

So I would just check those 3 unless you have a specific reason to check the other ones. We have had 0 problems installing our app on devices using those 3 only.

On a side note, turning on LLVM compiling and optimizing your icons/images will help with the final APK size.

*Edit: Since writing this we ran into a bug only on certain devices (Android Nexus 9) which leads to app crashes when launching the app. The solution is to check the arm64-v8a architecture. This will probably increase app size so weigh the pros and cons and see how much of a difference it makes in your APK size after including the architecture or split your APK for each architecture if necessary.

Upvotes: 4

Jon Douglas
Jon Douglas

Reputation: 13176

No you do not have to select all of them. You can create an .apk per ABI if you wanted to to reduce the size of your .apk. Note: The encouraged method is that you develop and publish a single .apk. However this is not always practical, and sometimes it's better to create separate ones. Although this answer only goes into depth about different CPU Architectures (ABI), you could also create different .apk for screen size, device features, and API levels.

https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/advanced_topics/build-abi-specific-apks/

http://developer.android.com/google/play/publishing/multiple-apks.html

I would recommend grabbing a tool like WinDirStat(https://windirstat.info/) or Disk Inventory X(http://www.derlien.com/) to investigate why your .apk is so large. You might find other reasons why your .apk is large such as resources(images, raw files), assemblies, etc.

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions