Android TV Will Require App Bundles In 2023, Should Reduce App Size By 20% (arstechnica.com) 14
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google announced that Android's space-saving app file format, Android App Bundles (AABs), will finally be the standard on Android TV. By May 2023 -- that's in six months -- Google will require all Android TV apps to switch to the new file format, which can cut down on app storage requirements by 20 percent.
Android App Bundles were announced with Android 9 in 2018 as a way to save device storage by breaking an app up into modules, rather than one big monolithic APK (the old Android app format) with every possible piece of data. Android apps support a ton of different languages, display resolutions, and CPU architectures, but each individual device only needs to cherry-pick a few of those options to work. Android App Bundles integrate with the Play Store to create a dynamic delivery system for each module. Your phone communicates which modules it needs to the Play Store, and Google's servers bundled up an appropriate package and sent it to your device. It's even possible for developers to move some lesser-used app functionality into a bundle that can be downloaded on the fly if a user needs it. [...]
Google says Android App Bundles average around a 20 percent space savings compared to a monolithic APK, which will be a huge help for these storage-starved devices. Since 2021, they have been the required standard for phones and tablets, and in six months, TV apps will be required to use them, too. Developers who don't switch in time will have their TV apps hidden from search, so they'd better get to work! Google estimates that "in most cases it will take one engineer about three days to migrate."
Android App Bundles were announced with Android 9 in 2018 as a way to save device storage by breaking an app up into modules, rather than one big monolithic APK (the old Android app format) with every possible piece of data. Android apps support a ton of different languages, display resolutions, and CPU architectures, but each individual device only needs to cherry-pick a few of those options to work. Android App Bundles integrate with the Play Store to create a dynamic delivery system for each module. Your phone communicates which modules it needs to the Play Store, and Google's servers bundled up an appropriate package and sent it to your device. It's even possible for developers to move some lesser-used app functionality into a bundle that can be downloaded on the fly if a user needs it. [...]
Google says Android App Bundles average around a 20 percent space savings compared to a monolithic APK, which will be a huge help for these storage-starved devices. Since 2021, they have been the required standard for phones and tablets, and in six months, TV apps will be required to use them, too. Developers who don't switch in time will have their TV apps hidden from search, so they'd better get to work! Google estimates that "in most cases it will take one engineer about three days to migrate."
Even saving 20% (Score:1)
App sizes are ludicrous. What's with 30MB+ for each streaming channel, when all these apps are doing the same thing?
Re: Even saving 20% (Score:2)
It's for pied Piper. It needs distributed storage.
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Ironically (Score:3)
Android App Bundles [are] a way to save device storage by breaking an app up into modules, rather than one big monolithic APK with every possible piece of data.
Android App Bundles are used to unbundle the apps; I get it.
Laying the foundation for a walled garden (Score:3)
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Since 2021, they have been the required standard for phones and tablets, and in six months, TV apps will be required to use them, too.
Did you miss the part where Google already implemented this for phones and tablets last year?
It is possible to sideload App Bundles to a device even if it can't access the internet or the Play store. Doing this requires using the Split APKs Installer (SAI) tool on a different device to package all the bundles back into an APK package for the target device to sideload. https://www.xda-developers.com... [xda-developers.com]
Perhaps it's not the easiest solution but at least there is a method that doesn't orphan some devices as p
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The current restrictions for phones and tablets aren't quite the same as what the summary describes. New apps have to use bundles, but apps which used APKs before bundles were introduced can continue to use APKs for updates. There does seem to be a bit of a mess with compatibility: I can't find a version of the OBB downloader which works with the newer compatibility layers, but nor can I find a version of the Play Asset Delivery library which is compatible with a large proportion of the devices that are use
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That is untrue. The requirement only applies to apps on the Play Store. Other apps, like open source ones from the F-Droid store, or ones that are side-loaded, are not affected.
People have been predicting that side-loading would go away, or that Android would only run apps signed by Google, for years now. Every time some change is made they soil themselves. It never happens and there is no indication that Google wants it to happen. In fact, with the various investigations going on into a potential monopoly
Local manager says it scales: (Score:1)
"I'm pretty sure if we put 144 people on this we can knock this out in 30 minutes."
Any loss of functionality? (Score:3)
What *can't* you do with App Bundles vs. APKs? Can they still be sideloaded outside the App Store environment, in particular?
Re:Any loss of functionality? (Score:4, Informative)
What *can't* you do with App Bundles vs. APKs? Can they still be sideloaded outside the App Store environment, in particular?
Last I checked, App bundles required using Google's "key escrow" service to sign the downloaded APKs. It makes a little bit of sense, in that since the APKs are generated on demand, and need to be signed, that Google would require this. But it also means the Play store can replace legitimate apps with customized versions, if compelled, by a government. Note, that authors still need to authenticate and sign their uploads. But those signatures are only used to authenticate the uploaded bundle, and not the APKs.
In terms of side loading an APK, the answer is yes and no. Essentially an app bundle is just a collection of APKs, which can be extracted individually, copied to another device and installed. That said, if the devices aren't identical, there is a good chance the source device won't have the right files. In the past APKs were split based on arch (x86, x86_64, armv7, and armv8a, plus a brief experiment with MIPs). So if you copied an APK within that arch category it worked. But now, if you copy the files off a different device, it might not contain everything you need. Screen resolution is probably the biggest separator, but their could be others.
I've migrated apps using ADB and it's a pain with APP bundles, so I've started using a helper app which creates a single apkm file (essentially a zip file) with all the APKs in a single file, and then reverses the process during install, which makes it less painful that manually extracting/installing 4 - 8 separate files.
The bottom line is that app bundles have a lot of benefits, especially for game developers who have lots of graphics files, some of which may not be needed. Since the Play store limits apps to 100 MiB this allows them to fit more into an initial download. (If they need more than 100 MiB they have to use the Google APIs to deliver the additional content on the fly, as it's needed).
For security focused apps, where making sure an app gets distributed without modification, app bundles are potentially evil, and could potentially break the entire Android security/trust model. Personally, I prefer to get those apps from F-droid, if possible. Of course I also have a lot of devices without Google services of any kind on them, which puts me on the extreme end of the spectrum.
Google _could_ have developed a method for developers to still sign their assets, by, for example, signing each asset inside an APK instead of the APK as a whole, but to my knowledge haven't opted to go that route, in favor of requiring key escrow.
Note, I haven't researched this issue in about a year, so if anyone has more recent info, please speak up.
Ha! (Score:2)
Why not cutting the whole resource devourer by half or more?
In my pocket i have a monster with 8GB RAM, 128 GB storage and 6 to 8 cores @2+GHz.
More or less the same as my small Linux daily driver.
Even if I could hook it up to an external monitor (which I cannot actually do) I would not be able to do the same. Mostly because how the whole stack is designed.