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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.

SirKnigget
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2 Answers2

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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.

CHT
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  • It doesn't solve the problem. There are a lot of games on Amazon with big APKs - there's no reason to have issues with that. – SirKnigget Sep 04 '13 at 12:23
  • The catch is most devices do not have enough RAM to actually handle large assets from the apk when installing. For example, the US version of the Galaxy S4 only comes with around 1GB of RAM, with at least 1/4 of it used by the system alone. As for the other games you mentioned, can you link some of them so I can see how they work? – CHT Sep 11 '13 at 03:17
  • http://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Software-Limited-Broken-Sword/dp/B0091273QW/ref=sr_1_1?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1378935364&sr=1-1&keywords=broken+sword – SirKnigget Sep 11 '13 at 21:36
  • 500MB is uncommon, but still handleable. What is the size of your apk file, just to ask. – CHT Sep 26 '13 at 03:21
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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).

SirKnigget
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