Android architecture usage?

Question

I have a few native libraries that are fairly big and bloating the application binary size. I looked into APK splitting but maintaining and QAing multiple APKs is not something I want to do.

So I'd like to exclude unused architectures in my release build flavour using the ndk.abiFilters Gradle property. (The debug builds I want to leave alone so that I can run the HAXM-accelerated emulator on x86).

I was thinking of just having armeabi-v7a and arm64-v8a in my release flavour, but I'm not sure whether it is worth worrying about the market share of the other architectures I'm dropping. After a lot of looking around I cannot find any reference to market share of ARMv6 (armeabi), MIPS, x86 or x86_64. My intuition tells me that the latter three are almost non-existent, but I'm not sure about ARMv6.

I found this link on a forum that has a list of phones that use various architectures. Is there something more reliable somewhere? Maybe with % of users similar to the Android version dashboard?

Anything else I may miss if I just build my native libs for armeabi-v7a and arm64-v8a (or armeabi, armeabi-v7a and arm64-v8a)?

Answer 1

First off, if you're worring about binary size, you don't really need arm64-v8a, all those devices can run the armeabi-v7a binaries just fine. Only if you really need to cram the last extra performance out of it, it might be worthwhile.

As for armeabi and ARMv6; Android itself doesn't officially support it any longer, since Android 4.4 (October 2013) - and since Android 4.0 it should be much less common (from that version, AOSP source requires modifications to still build for ARMv6). So in practice, if you aren't supporting versions below 4.4, you can drop that one without any significant loss.

Also, for x86; many of those devices ship with surprisingly decent emulation of arm binaries, so those can manage with the armeabi-v7a version just fine as well.

EDIT: The above was written in 2015; these days Play Store requires that apps include support for arm64-v8a. But these days the next question is more about whether you need to include armeabi-v7a at all, or if the market share of 32 bit devices is small enough to drop support for.