Error installing application after adding android:extractNativeLibs in AndroidManifest.xml

Question

I developed Android application with NDK. I updated Android Studio cur.ver. 2.2.2 Run the application. Application is already installed in device. But now it was not updating in Marshmallow device, else working fine. Getting following error in Run console. When android:extractNativeLibs="false" in AndroidManifest.xml. If android:extractNativeLibs="true" then Application is updating in device.

$ adb shell pm install -r "/data/local/tmp/"
pkg:/data/local/tmp/ Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_INVALID_APK]

Why this happening? Can anyone explain me?

Answer 1

After some investigation, I found out that the problem was that the APK was not page-aligned, which is an additional step performed by zipalign, but needs an specific flag. It is important to notice that this flag is available starting from Build Tools version 23.0.0. Flag is -p (page align stored shared object files).

$ build-tools/23.0.0/zipalign
Zip alignment utility
Copyright (C) 2009 The Android Open Source Project

Usage: zipalign [-f] [-p] [-v] [-z] <align> infile.zip outfile.zip
       zipalign -c [-v] <align> infile.zip

  <align>: alignment in bytes, e.g. '4' provides 32-bit alignment
  -c: check alignment only (does not modify file)
  -f: overwrite existing outfile.zip
  -p: page align stored shared object files
  -v: verbose output
  -z: recompress using Zopfli

So, the right command is:

zipalign -p -v 4 inapk.apk outapk.apk

The clue was in the following logcat trace:

12-21 12:31:01.706 933-999/? I/ActivityManager: Start proc 21138:com.android.defcontainer/u0a36 for service com.android.defcontainer/.DefaultContainerService
12-21 12:31:01.773 21138-21150/? E/NativeLibraryHelper: Failed to load assets verifier: 0
12-21 12:31:01.783 21138-21149/? D/DefContainer: Copying /data/local/tmp/wasabi-wallet-app-agoraProduction-release_1.27.0_#78_signed_zipaligned.apk to base.apk
12-21 12:31:01.954 933-999/? E/NativeLibraryHelper: Failed to load assets verifier: 0
12-21 12:31:01.955 933-999/? D/NativeLibraryHelper: Library 'libpanorenderer.so' is not page-aligned - will not be able to open it directly from apk.
12-21 12:31:01.955 933-999/? W/NativeHelper: Failure copying native libraries [errorCode=-2]
12-21 12:31:01.955 933-999/? I/art: Starting a blocking GC Explicit
12-21 12:31:02.042 933-999/? I/art: Explicit concurrent mark sweep GC freed 92355(7MB) AllocSpace objects, 13(308KB) LOS objects, 33% free, 27MB/41MB, paused 1.044ms total 87.077ms
12-21 12:31:02.052 21128-21128/? I/art: System.exit called, status: 1
12-21 12:31:02.052 21128-21128/? I/AndroidRuntime: VM exiting with result code 1.

For additional information see: #SmallerAPK, Part 8: Native libraries, open from APK (notice that even there is the command zipalign -p 4 it's quite easy to confuse it with the old common zipalign -v 4, if you happen to whip through it. Also, original documentation for zipalign (updated for current versions of Build Tools) zipalign.