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Android App Bundle (AAB)

Docs › App Distribution › Distribute Apps › Android App Bundle (AAB)

The Android App Bundle (AAB) is Android’s new, official publishing format that offers a more efficient way to build and release your app.

The Android App Bundle lets you more easily deliver a great experience in a smaller app size, which can improve install success and reduce uninstalls. It’s easy to switch. You don’t need to refactor your code to start benefiting from a smaller app. And once you’ve switched, you’ll benefit from modular app development and customizable feature delivery.

AAB provides a new format (.aab files) that includes all your app’s compiled code and resources, and defers APK generation and signing to Google Play.

android-app-bundle

Applivery support for AAB #

Although Google Play uses an app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each device configuration, so only the code and resources that are needed for a specific device are downloaded to run your app, Applivery is not yet able to provide that feature since we do not have a faithful way to detect the hardware information of the device – mandatory to generate an optimized APK file – since Applivery users normally use their Browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, etc) to download Apps from the Applivery App Stores. Instead, Applivery takes advantage of the Android App Bundle features to generate Universal APKs that include all the information needed to install your Android applications on any device in the world supported by your App, independently of the hardware. It means that some AAB features can not be fully supported by Applivery such as Dynamic Delivery which enables smaller app sizes and feature-based delivery. Applivery uses Android’s Official bundle tool to extract the Universal APK from your app bundle. Below we will explain the different requirements to upload your app bundles to Applivery. In the meantime, our team is actively working on providing full support for all Android App Bundle features shortly in two ways:
  • Device prediction to enable Dynamic Delivery from Applivery App Stores.
  • Get device hardware information at the Applivery SDK level to enable Dynamic Delivery of updates.
Additional information regarding this can be found in our public roadmap on GitHub.

Configuring Android App Bundle #

Step 1 - Adding your Keystore configuration #

Go to the Settings > Android App Bundle section of the App where you want to enable AAB. You will need to collect the following mandatory information:

  • Keystore: deployment keystore (.jks file) used to sign the APKs.
  • Keystore password: keystore’s password. It could be specified in plain text or .pwd file.
  • Keystore alias: specifies the alias of the signing key you want to use.
  • Key: specifies the password for the signing key. It could be specified in plain text or .pwd file.
AAB-keystore-config

Step 2 - Upload your .aab file as you normally do with APKs #

Use one of the following options to upload your app bundle file to Applivery:

  • From the Dashboard, go to your Builds section and select (or drag and drop) your .aab file.
  • From the Upload API, using the same method to upload standard APKs.
  • Use any of the existing integrations with the most common CD & CI platforms.
upload-aab-files
Updated on February 19, 2024
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