Google announces Android App Bundle
Announcement from Google Developer's Blog yesterday:
"The Android App Bundle is Android's new publishing format, with which you can more easily deliver a great experience in a smaller app size, and optimize for the wide variety of Android devices and form factors available. The app bundle includes all your app's compiled code and resources, but defers APK generation and signing to Google Play. You no longer have to build, sign, and manage multiple APKs.
"The Android App Bundle is Android's new publishing format, with which you can more easily deliver a great experience in a smaller app size, and optimize for the wide variety of Android devices and form factors available. The app bundle includes all your app's compiled code and resources, but defers APK generation and signing to Google Play. You no longer have to build, sign, and manage multiple APKs.
Google Play's new app serving model, called Dynamic Delivery, uses your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each user's device configuration. This means people download only the code and resources they need to run your app. People see a smaller install size on the Play Store, can install your app more quickly, and save space on their devices."
Will this affect our apps built using Andromo?
Any thoughts?
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It's uncertain whether this is something that would even be possible for existing Andromo apps, simply because it involves Google Play re-signing the apk. My initial thought was, this would make it a no-go for existing apps, as we obviously cannot share our private keys. I don't see any way it could even be considered unless Google Play removed the restriction they've always had on changing the certificate you use to sign apps.
(To date the rule has always been: once an app is signed, it can never be signed with any other certificate. No matter what. Mistakenly generate a certificate that expires too early? Too bad so sad, your app is dead. The resulting extreme importance of getting the signing process correct is one of the reasons we've always taken care of that detail for you.)
However, it's possible Google may finally be providing a way to change an app's private key. It depends whether you need the original private key to be able to opt into app signing initially.
Ultimately, whether it's possible or feasible for us to adopt this will depend on a lot of details that are still unclear. We'd also need to evaluate whether any potential benefits are worth the additional complexity/responsibility for our users.
But before we can even consider this, we have to finish addressing the GDPR changes, and the target API 26 changes, and...
So, yeah, it's still too soon to say.