I need to compile my application with additional libraries. The problem is that I do not want to include external libraries inside my application.
In Eclipse I have the option to toggle if I want a selected library/source to be exported with my application or not.
How could I modify ant script to simply skip the given libraries, and to not include them when building apk?
Also, any information regarding how adt plugin creates apk would be nice.
Use the libraryjars option in Proguard. It skips the jar from the output. Quoting the documentation.
Specifies the library jars (or wars, ears, zips, or directories) of the application to be processed. The files in these jars will not be included in the output jars.
The proguard android example can get you started on the config file. Proguard can also be invoked from ant.
Related
Recently, I ported my existing Android project from an ancient Gradle version to Gradle 6.6 and Android Studio's Gradle plugin 4.0.1. This project uses an external native library (.so file) that gets used in the Java code via JNI. This .so library has a dependency on libc++_shared.so because it is written in C++.
I realized that if I just copy the .so file into the corresponding platform folder (arm64-v8a, armeabi-v7a, x86, x86_64) within the jniLibs Gradle packages it "properly" into my .apk file.
By "properly" I mean that it automatically adds libc++_shared.so, which my library has a dependency on, as well as my own library to the .apk file. In addition, if I additionally set jniDebuggable to true in the build.gradle file it will also add the gdbserver library which is required to be able to attach the native code debugger.
Now, this is exactly what I want. The problem is that I cannot find any documentation that describes this behavior. The best source I could find is this but it does not mention anything about dependencies being packaged automatically. So, I don't know whether that is an officially supported way of doing things.
I suspect that there is a part of Android's Gradle based build process that automatically analyzes the files in the jniLibs folder and acts accordingly. It would be great to know a bit more to be aware what is really going on.
Does anyone have a reference that confirms my above observations or know which Gradle task (or whatever) accomplishes this? It would also be good to know in which Android Gradle plugin version this behavior was introduced.
Edit:
This answer to another SO question led me to the Android source file https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/build/+/master/builder/src/main/java/com/android/builder/internal/packaging/Packager.java
which seems to be the code that packages the .so files and gdbserver into the .apk file. But I have no explanation why libc++_shared.so gets packaged as well.
I'm trying to build an app bundle but I'm getting the following error:
File 'root/lib/x86_64-MacOSX-gpp/jni/libjunixsocket-native-2.0.4.jnilib' uses reserved file or directory name 'lib'.
For what I've seen from similar questions, this issue is normally solved juggling dependencies or files in the project structure, but in this case it seems to point to a native library involved in app architecture if i'm not mistaken. Any ideas how to solve this?
It looks like you are adding a dependency as a jar instead of an aar.
The aar contains the information of what files should be considered as Android resources, native libraries, etc. in the app. A jar is just a plain list of files without Android concept. Because the jar you're depending on contains a directory lib, the files would normally end up being considered as native libraries, but because the files come from a jar instead of an aar, the build system warns that it's unlikely to be a native library and may have unintended consequences at runtime.
Try to package that library as an .aar instead of a .jar. See this documentation: https://developer.android.com/studio/projects/android-library
Edit:
Note that this file could not be loaded by the Android platform if it was included as is in the APK, so even though the previous build systems would allow you to put anything in an APK, the Android App Bundle is more restrictive to ensure that you don't accidentally put unnecessary files which would increase unnecessarily the size of your app.
Ok it is working now! Steps I used to found the problem (thanks for pointing me in the right direction #Pierre)
Run a gradle build --scan from your terminal or go to the Gradle tab in Android Studio, select :app, help , androidDependencies to see your dependency graph.
Search the dependency graph for the library name related to the problem ( in my case I searched for socket, there was no match for libjunixsocket for example).
Going upwards on the dependency tree I realized it was caused by the 'io.voucherify.android.client:voucherify-android-sdk:2.1.0' dependency.
I just added #aar at the end of the dependency implementation, and I managed to build the app bundle.
implementation 'io.voucherify.android.client:voucherify-android-sdk:2.1.0#aar'
I have a package integrated to Android 5.0 sources. It has a java service and a couple of native libraries. When I build it I get an apk with symbolic links to native libs (in /system/lib64/) and it's supposed that libs are already there. I have to make the package installable from app market, that is all libs must be included to the apk. I could get such an apk with SDK, but I cannot use it because I have dependencies on non-public libs and java classes.
How can I build apk in-tree so that my native libs are included in apk itself?
It really depends on the libs you want to use.
If you rely on libssl.so and libcrypto.so, you should compile your own version of OpenSSL, include and use it from your APK.
For other system libs that are officially part of the NDK (libc.so, libandroid.so...), there is no need to symbolic link anything, they will automatically be loaded from the system.
If you really need to use non-public libs and classes, you can do so, by loading directly the libs from the system, it doesn't make sense to embed a copy of these. However it may be a big source of crashes to use anything private, you shouldn't do that.
I wish to back port the Android RTP APIs introduced in version 3.1(Honeycomb) to earlier versions. I downloaded the source of version 4.0 and found that it these APIs had both java and native code. In order to build the native code with the NDK, certain shared libraries are required.
According the Android.mk file, these are libnativehelper, libcutils, libutils, and libmedia. Though the source of all of these are present in the source code, building them was difficult. Each required many other shared libraries. For eg, libmedia requires these shared libraries: libui, libcutils, libutils, libbinder, libsonivox, libicuuc, libexpat, libcamera_client, libstagefright_foundation, libgui and libdl.
So my question is, is there some way of obtaining the original 4 shared libs? Does it involve building the entire source?
Say I need to build a piece of native code which is going to use standard Android shared libraries such as libutils, libcutlis, libmedia. I would perform following steps:
Install AOSP repository with target version.
Add my source code to appropriate directories under ./frameworks/base. In your case it might be easier to create a separate folder and put proper Android.mk of course.
You might get compile errors if required functions from those standard shared libraries are not present in the previous version.
When you build the code as part of AOSP it will build required libraries and link them for you automatically.
P.S. To accomplish that you're better to use a Linux-based build host.
using cygwin terminal, build native part i.e. jni folder. To build using cygwin, goto jni folder using cygdrive command. Then type ndk-build. After successful completion, shared libraries i.e. .so files will be created in libs folder.
I can understand your problem, you can pull the libraries from /system/lib of device or emulator. But you need a system permission. But you can do it by installing application.
Otherwise build your source code on linux platfor. Building process is very easy, just using 2 or 3 command. First time it is needed long time to build. After that you need very short time to build, it will build only according to the timestamp of modified code.
Please have a look here
I have a project that I would like to add external libraries to (and have them packaged with the application) but I am not sure it is happening. I read on this link:
https://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/faq/commontasks.html
how to, but they do not show up in any of the /data/data/project directories. Does anyone know how I can confirm that the libraries were in fact added to the project for use at runtime? Thanks.
If you include jars as External Jars under your project's Java Build Path, then the classes will be converted to Dalvik format and be made available in your project's classes.dex file, packaged into the .apk.
To confirm they are available, attempt to use something from the jar (Eclipse should suggest the relevant import when you first supply a class name) build and run the app and see if it works? If it works in development (e.g. from 'run' in Eclipse) then it will also work when the app is built in release and distributed as an APK.
You can also place jar under one of your source folders (perhaps creating special "libs" one) and adding it to build path.
Be warned - external libraries (which are compiled against some version or other of the libraries in a Java JDK) may sometimes have problems when running under android. This is because the Dalvik runtime has its own Java framework libraries, which provide most (but not all) of the Java APIs in the standard JDK Java framework libraries.
You should really recompile any external library against the android libraries so that you can see any missing APIs at compile time - and fix the issues there and then. Otherwise you run the risk of runtime errors under Dalvik when you call the external library from your Android app. See http://geekswithblogs.net/cyberycon/archive/2011/05/17/using-external-libraries-with-android.aspx
for more details.