CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidandroid-multidex
Jenix
Jenix

Reputation: 3076

How can I disable MultiDex in Android Studio?

I know how to enable MultiDex support, but my problem is the opposite. Seems like my Android Studio's MultiDex option is enabled by default for some reason. When I unziped the resulting APK file and checked inside, there were two files.

classes.dex and classes2.dex.

You may say my project may hit 64K limit, but no, it doesn't. I also tried without any dependencies and with some other gradle settings, but the result was all the same. I even put the line multiDexEnabled false, but it didn't help either. So this time I created another new empty project, and hit the Run button without any modification. Result? Same.

enter image description here

enter image description here

As you can see, I have two .dex files with very low references. I don't understand what's happening here..

The reason why I'm trying to disable MultiDex is,

First, my app is really simple with a few dependencies so just don't need it.

Second, the app needs to support even older Android OS.

Third, I want to avoid the Dalvik linearAlloc limitation in the old Android devices.

Finally, I want to know the exact cause of this.

One more fun fact. I decompiled and looked into the the apk file, and couldn't find the class named MainActivity which was created by default while the app ran on my phone as expected. The same is true for my real project. The app works well but there isn't my code in the classes*.dex. Yeah, it's fine if the app works without any problem, but it's somewhat annoying because I sometimes want to decompile and see the resulted code.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2963

Answers (1)

CommonsWare
CommonsWare

Reputation: 1006674

Things like Instant Run change the nature of the APK. What you get when you run the app from the IDE is different than what you get when you build the app by other means (Build APK(s) in the menu, gradle tasks, etc.).

This is one of the reason why I disable Instant Run, as I'm one of those crazy people who wants to run the same app that my users would run.

Android Studio 3.0 makes another change to the APK, compared to what your users will run: it adds android:testOnly="true", preventing that APK from being installed normally. Probably this is a safety measure, so that you only distribute APKs made through some other build mechanism.

In your case, based on the comments, it appears that Instant Run was what was causing the multidex-style behavior. That may be tied to how Instant Run attempts to patch an already-installed APK, rather than push the fresh APK to the device or emulator.

So, either disable Instant Run or don't analyze the Run output, but instead focus on APKs built by other means.

Upvotes: 1

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