Issues with large APK file

Question

I'm creating a version of my game for app stores such as Amazon, which don't have the APK expansion mechanism - so I put all the files in my "assets" folder.

However, my 300+ MB APK seems to create a lot of problems:

1. When I try to install it with ADB on either the emulator or Samsung Galaxy S2, about 75% of the times it fails. From Samsung, I get INSTALL_FAILED_MEDIA_UNAVAILABLE (although it's not mounted, and there's plenty of free space), and from the emulator, I get just 'null'. Again, this happens about 75% of the time, completely random.

2. My game locks up at a certain point in native code. There's absolutely nothing there that can lock up or has anything to do with the OS - just plain C++ logic. I verified that this issue happens ONLY when I push large assets into the APK. If I remove the assets (completely unused, just pushing large files there), the issue doesn't happen. Just to clarify - in order to test that, I manually pushed the game files into the device, so it has nothing to do with the asset extraction.

This is very weird, and I'm starting to consider getting my own expansion file server.

Any ideas?

UPDATE:

1. Found the solution to #2. The code base I was using was doing something hackish in the background with the APK assets, that's why it locked up. I removed that code, so #2 is irrelevant.

The only issue now is difficulty installing large APK files.

Answer 1

I found that the installation problem happens only with ADB. By manually copying a big APK to the device external storage, and then installing using a file manager app, there is never a problem.

Regarding the 2nd problem - as updated on the original question - it was a specific problem with the app (someone wrote shitty code that manipulates all the APK assets).

Answer 2

How about making two seperate apps for the game?
One for the game code and the other for just the large assets. Pardon my intrusion.