Android including native binaries ARM and ARMv7

Question

I have been distributing my app with armeabi and armeabi-v7 versions of native binary but recently started to get a lot of UnsatisfiedLinkError errors where "somehow" one of the native binaries (app has few) isn't extracted/copied on install. I can't reproduce it but it looks like this is due to size of the app being near to 8 MB.

I want to stop including armeabi-v7 in the app to save near enough 2 MB and done some tests on 3 devices I have. Everything seems to be working. I also noticed (for example) Dropbox only distributes armeabi.

Would you advise against it? And yes, native binary does some number crunching and encoding but there is no optimization in build script?

Answer 1

8 MB should not be a problem. However, you can safely drop armeabi-v7a if you verify that it is not performance bottleneck.

Alternatively, you can use the multi-APK approach to make user downloads smaller. The official site recommends: You should generally use multiple APKs to support different device configurations only when your APK is too large (greater than 50MB). You should carefully follow the version code guidelines if you choose this route.