An
Android App Bundle
is a publishing format that includes all your app’s
compiled code and resources, and defers APK generation and signing to Google
Play.
Google Play uses your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each
device configuration, so only the code and resources that are needed for a
specific device are downloaded to run your app. You no longer have to build,
sign, and manage multiple APKs to optimize support for different devices, and
users get smaller, more-optimized downloads.
Most app projects won’t require much effort to build app bundles that support
serving optimized APKs. For example,
if you already
organize your app’s code and
resources
according to established conventions, simply
build signed Android App
Bundles
using Android Studio or
using
the command line
, and
upload them to Google
Play
. Optimized APK serving then becomes an
automatic benefit.
When you use the app bundle format to publish your app, you can also optionally
take advantage of
Play Feature Delivery
,
which allows you to add
feature modules
to your app project.
These modules contain features and resources that are only included with your
app based on conditions that you specify, or are available later at runtime for
download
Using the Play Core Library
.
Game developers who publish their apps with app bundles can use
Play Asset Delivery
: Google Play’s solution
for delivering large amounts of game assets that offers developers flexible
delivery methods and high performance.
Watch the following video for an overview of why you should publish your app
using Android App Bundles.
Compressed download size restriction
Publishing with Android App Bundles helps your users to install your app with
the smallest downloads possible and increases the
compressed download size
limit to 200 MB
. That is, when a user downloads your app, the total size of
the compressed APKs required to install your app (for example, the base APK +
configuration APKs) must be no more than 200 MB. Any subsequent downloads, such
as downloading a feature module (and its configuration APKs) on demand, must
also meet this compressed download size restriction. Asset packs do not
contribute to this size limit, but they do have other
size restrictions
.
When you upload your app bundle, if the Play Console finds any of the possible
downloads of your app or its on demand features to be more than 200 MB, you get
an error.
Keep in mind,
Android App Bundles do not support APK expansion (
*.obb
)
files
. So, if you encounter this error when publishing your app bundle, use
one of the following resources to reduce compressed APK download sizes:
- Make sure you
enable all configuration APKs
by setting
enableSplit = true
for each type of configuration APK. This makes
sure that users download only the code and resources they need to run your app
on their device.
- Make sure you
shrink your app
by removing unused
code and resources.
- Follow best practices to further
reduce app size
.
- Consider converting features that are used by only some of your users into
feature modules
that your app can download later, on demand. Keep in mind, this may require
some refactoring of your app, so make sure to first try the other suggestions
described above.
Other considerations
The following are the currently known issues when building or serving your app
with Android App Bundles. If you experience issues that are
not described below, please
report a bug
.
- Partial installs of sideloaded apps?that is, apps that are not installed using
the Google Play Store and are missing one or more required split APKs?fail on
all Google-certified devices and devices running Android 10 (API level 29) or
higher. When downloading your app through the Google Play Store, Google
ensures that all required components of the app are installed.
- If you use tools that dynamically modify resource tables, APKs generated
from app bundles might behave unexpectedly. So, when building an app bundle,
it is recommended that you disable such tools.
- It is currently possible to configure properties in a feature
module’s build configuration that conflict with those from the base (or
other) modules. For example, you can set
buildTypes.release.debuggable =
true
in the base module and set it to
false
in a feature module.
Such conflicts might cause build and runtime issues. Keep in mind, by default,
feature modules inherit some build configurations from the base
module. So, make sure you understand which configurations you should keep,
and which ones you should omit, in your
feature module build
configuration
.
Additional resources
To learn more about Android App Bundles, consult the following resources.
Blog posts
Videos