792151 - (moreapks) Build and deploy multiple APKs tailored for different screen sizes and device capabilities

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Build System :: Android Studio and Gradle Integration, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

ARMv6 devices generally are lower-end devices with smaller screens. It may be possible to exclude big-screen UI assets from the ARMv6 .apk file entirely. It should also to have smaller/lower-resolution UI assets for the low-memory devices, which should reduce the memory requirement on the Java side.

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Removing the tablet UI stuff seems an easy win.

Comment 3

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

What are all resolutions are supported by armv6 devices?
I believe shipping ldpi (needs to be created) and mdpi seems to be a safe bet. MDPI can stand up to HDPI (with pixellation), but won't crash the app.

Comment 4

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Kevin Brosnan [:kbrosnan] from comment #2)
> Removing the tablet UI stuff seems an easy win.

I don't know if we can do this across the board for the ARMv6 APK. There is at least one ARMv6 tablet out there: http://www.tinydeal.com/android-233-7-multi-touch-wifi-tablet-armv6512mb-hd-p-52309.html  (with a screen resolution of 800x480)

Otherwise most ARMv6 phones I've seen are 320x480 or smaller.

Comment 5

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

If the tablet is not running honeycomb+, we don't need tablet resources, as we dont support tablet interface for anything that's not running honeycomb+.

Comment 6

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Wont-fix?

Comment 7

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

I'd like to leave this open for now. It's still a viable method for reducing resource usage.

Comment 8

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I'd like to resurrect this bug. Can we get a mentor on it? Maybe we should just start with *not* bundling XHDPI and XXHDPI assets?

Comment 10

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Potentially useful:

https://code.google.com/p/android-unused-resources/
https://github.com/KeepSafe/android-resource-remover

Comment 11

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

And more context:

http://developer.android.com/google/play/publishing/multiple-apks.html

Strictly speaking it's possible to publish different APKs for different screen sizes, as well as different architectures.

I don't think this is something we should plan on doing, but if we decide to get really aggressive with this -- e.g., if we start supplying large images for a new feature -- we could explore supplying multiple APKs with tailored resource sets.

Comment 12

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

We no longer support ARMv6. Bug 1039789 will split our APK between API9 (resource constrained) and "everything else".

Morphing this bug to be the evolution of that.

Comment 13

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

This is an extension of the work done in Bug 1039789.  We should investigate what we get by building screen size dependent APKs.

Two broad thoughts:

1) I think the technical path to get here should be to push building with Gradle across the line (Bug 1119520); there's no sense rolling this support ourselves.

2) There are finnicky version code issues all over this.  See Bug 1137586 and the discussion at http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/user-guide/apk-splits.

Comment 14

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Nick: perhaps file a new bug for this? The first ten comments are kinda misleading.

Comment 16

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Re-triaging per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Needinfo :susheel if you think this bug should be re-triaged.

Comment 17

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 3 duplicates.
:nalexander, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 18

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

We can close this: we don't produce APKs at all for GeckoView; any changes here would be over in Fenix-land.