Android App Bundle

Android App Bundle is a new publishing format that contains all the compiled code and resources of your app, but leaves the actual APK generation and signing to Google Play. The store then uses the app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs based on the device configuration of the specific user. In general, the benefit of using Android App Bundles is that you no longer have to build, sign, and manage multiple APKs to support different devices, and users get smaller, more optimized downloads. For more information about the Android App Bundle, see the About Android App Bundles article in the official Android Developer documentation.

Note: In order to get a maximum app size reduction, you can combine the Android App Bundle with a compiled V8 heap snapshot.

Produce Android App Bundle

You can perform a full build and produce a signed AAB using the NativeScript CLI:

tns build android --release --key-store-path <path-to-your-keystore> --key-store-password <your-key-store-password> --key-store-alias <your-alias-name> --key-store-alias-password <your-alias-password> --aab --copy-to <aab-location>.aab

Changing the default target architectures

WARNING: Filtering the target architectures does not reduce the app size, it just drops the support for the devices and emulators using the missing architecture.

By default, the generated aab file supports all of the available device architectures - armeabi-v7a, arm64-v8a, x86 and x86_64. This behavior can be overridden from your App_Resources/Android/app.gradle's apiFilters property:

android {
....
  defaultConfig {
    ....
    ndk {
      abiFilters.clear()
      abiFilters "x86_64", "x86", "arm64-v8a", "armeabi-v7a"
    }
  }
....

Note: If you use the V8 snapshots feature and change the target architectures, you can also apply the same change in the snapshot plugin by providing it's targetArchs option in order to avoid generating redundant snapshots and speed up the app build time.

Testing the produced .aab file

Starting from NativeScript CLI 6.2.0, the Android App Bundle is supported out of the box by the tns run command:

tns run android --key-store-path <path-to-your-keystore> --key-store-password <your-key-store-password> --key-store-alias <your-alias-name> --key-store-alias-password <your-alias-password> --aab

Testing the produced .aab file before NativeScript 6.2

For older NativeScript version, in order to test the apk files that Google Play will produce from the .aab for a specific device you will need to use the Android bundletool or upload to Google Play and use a test track.

If you use the bundletool you should first generate an .apks file that will later be used to deploy on a device.

java -jar <toolPath>/bundletool.jar build-apks --bundle=<somePath>/app.aab  --output="<somePath>/my_app.apks"
--ks=<path to keystore file> 
--ks-pass=pass:<keystore pass> 
--ks-key-alias=<key alias> 
--key-pass=pass:<key pass>

Then you can install the application on a connected device by executing:

Note: Devices running Android 4.4 (API level 19) and lower don’t support downloading and installing split APKs. On such devices bundletool will not be able to deploy the application. When the bundle is released Google Play will serve a single multi-APK to such devices.

java -jar <toolPath>/bundletool.jar install-apks --apks="somePath/my_app.apks" --device-id=<deviceId>

You can find more information about using Android bundletool here.