Explicit recommendation in docs on what ABIs to include in the apk

Unfortunately, the F-Droid doesn’t support Android App Bundle format, which means only a single APK file can be published. If an app depends on native libraries, that may be quite frustrating for users, as they will download fat APKs which include unnecessary native libs for their devices.

Investigating the docs of F-Droid I didn’t find any explicit guiding on what ABIs to include in the result APK file, and I would really want to strip off the redundant native libs from the beginning.

Can someone explain me what ABIs are supported by F-Droid? And better it would be to add such a section to the docs.

The buildserver just do what you tell it to do. So It’s up to you to decide what ABI should be included. You can build apks for every ABIs you want. The only problem is that we can’t auto update it if there is more that one apks for a version.

@linsui

I understand that I can ‘build whatever I want’. It is just many distribution markets like Google Play, Huawei App Gallery, Amazon App Center publish their statistics on what ABIs are used by their users. Which is exactly the info I would like to see at F-Droid.

The VLC app for some reason has an APK with only x86_64 binaries inside. Why? Isn’t F-Droid supported on arm devices?

The AntennaPod includes all 4 ABIs (arm, arm64, x86, x86_64). Seems descent, but isn’t it an overkill for F-Droid specifically?

The info about supported ABIs is crucial for publication in F-Droid. It isn’t user-firenly to publish only fat APKs.

Do you want some statictics from F-Droid? We don’t track users so we don’t have that…

VLC has 4 apks from every version. Users on arm can install arm apks.

Yes, most users don’t need that but it’s convient.

You can publish armv7 apks which support most users.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.