Android Studio release build not zipaligning

Question

I'm having trouble uploading my .apk to Google Play Store. I've previously been able to upload multiple different builds up to last week, but today I get the error that I should zipalign my file first.

EDIT: Normally, I was able to generate signed and zipaligned .apk's that the AppStore accepted by just using Android Studios built-in "Generate Signed APK" wizard. This did not work today, and led to the following:

I've tried the following:

• Manual zipalign of the app-release.apk generated by Android studio. When I try this, I get the error "VERIFICATION FAILED" at the end. Some googling says that providing full path to a location where you have write-access is important, so I've tried doing it with the specific path, but to no avail:

  ./zipalign -v -f 4 /Users/<username>/git/<projectname>/app/app-release.apk /Users/<username>/git/<projectname>/app/aligned.apk

• I then tried to download the APK Signer 1.8.5 and use that to zipalign the .apk - and behold, success! It creates an aligned apk, and i'm able to verify it using both Android Studio's own zipalign tool by

  ./zipalign -c -v 4 app-release_ALIGNED.apk

  and the APK Signer itself. However, when uploading I now get the error:

  Failed to run aapt dump badging: W/ResourceType(208730): Bad resource table: header size 0x80a3 or total size 0x80b50000 is larger than data size 0x7bcc4 ERROR: dump failed because the resource table is invalid/corrupt.

  This, I haven't been able to find solutions for.

• I then tried to recreate the circumstances I was previously able to upload APKs from by reverting to a previous commit/build, as well as reverting from AS 2.2 preview 3 to AS2.2 preview 2, but again - no luck.

• Finally, I tried explicitly adding

  zipAlignEnabled true

  to my release config in Gradle, but that didn't help either.

I'm out of suggestions, and hoping someone can help? :-) Thanks

Answer 1

Finally, eureka!

I randomly stumbled upon this line in my root build.gradle:

classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:2.2.0-alpha3'

Android Studio 2.2 preview 3 requires this gradle build tool upgrade, and I had just pressed "sure, go ahead" as always. I got curious, and tried to change it back to what had worked last,

classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:2.2.0-alpha2'

and built the project in Android Studio preview 2 instead - and voila, it worked! It seems there is a bug with the alpha3 build.

I hope this helps someone. I know I'm a happy friday-camper, that's for sure! :-)

Note to self: Don't rely on canary-builds for production apps in the future, no matter how much my friends and collegues push.

Answer 2

Here are the things that I faced a few days ago: Try them one at a time:

• After downloading Android Studio 2.2 Preview 2 - which was released during the IO conference, I ran my code successfully until when time came to release a newer version of the apk to the playstore. That was when hell broke loose!
• I searched all over but I got nothing. So, someone suggested the following approach: After generating your signed apk, unzip it and delete META-INF folder then re-package it and manually sign it through the terminal. Packaging a file into .apk format is simple: just use a zip extension then rename the extension.
• Although that seemed like it could have worked for me, it didn't. It worked for others though.
• Finally, I realized that it was caused by a bug in the latest Android Studio Preview 2.
• Thankfully, I still had my stable 2.1 version which I opened, loaded my project and Boom! It worked like I expected it to.

So, please try the last option, clean up your project first then try again. I know how frustrating this can be. Good luck!