Question about behavior of extract-apks subcommand with --device-spec flag about bundletool HOT 2 CLOSED

The extract-apks command with --device-spec flag will extract the APK that should be served to that device by the store for the given device configuration.

The supportedAbis value of the DeviceSpec does not tell bundletool what libraries to include, but rather the preferred order of the ABIs supported by the device: bundletool thus selects the best ABI for the device based on the libraries available in the App Bundle.

I can't think of a good use-case to generate APKs with multiple ABIs since Android devices will eventually only load the native libraries for a single ABI.

Note that I'm only talking about release APKs here. For testing purposes, the universal APK can be generated using the --universal flag (see the help of the build-apks command) and will contain all native libraries.

I hope that helps. Let me know if something is still unclear.

from bundletool.

The supportedAbis value of the DeviceSpec does not tell bundletool what libraries to include, but rather the preferred order of the ABIs supported by the device: bundletool thus selects the best ABI for the device based on the libraries available in the App Bundle.

Thanks for clarification. I suspected that this might be the case but good to have confirmation.

I can't think of a good use-case to generate APKs with multiple ABIs since Android devices will eventually only load the native libraries for a single ABI.

In my case I wanted to make sure that separate apks generated by bundletool are run correctly on test devices with different ABIs. So I thought extract-apks will produce base-master.apk and base-armeabi_v7a.apk, base-arm64_v8a etc. (for every abi from supportedAbis). I guess I was confused by previous experience with apk splits from android gradle plugin since they work this way.
But this could be achieved by using different spec files.

I hope that helps. Let me know if something is still unclear.

Yes, thanks again for quick response. I don't have any further questions.

from bundletool.