Play Store now requires arm64 binaries - compiling is not well supported, and binaries are unstable and crash

[dballard]

https://developer.android.com/distribute/best-practices/develop/64-bit

Since August 1 2019 play store requires apks or app bundles that support both armeabi-v7a and arm64-v8a

It isn't clear how to get therecipe/qt to produce something that would satisfy this. Was hoping to get a conversation started about updating qtdeploy to satisfy this requirement.

We are currently experimenting with a custom build.gradle and "splits" (https://developer.android.com/studio/build/configure-apk-splits) but don't have a solution yet

[dballard]

https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/ui/pulls/455/files

So here is the gradle file we've made to inject into our builds.

If first detects (would have liked the GOARCH but system.getenv was throwing a not defined here error) the arch path from gradle.properties qt5AndroidDir, and then makes a splits build of the one called for arch. inside that it has both debug and release tasks to rename the output apk from the splits build to the one that therecipe/qt is expecting and can pick up and work with.

It still needs to be invoked twice, one with GOARCH=arm and once with GOARCH=arm64 since we have to compile the code base for each arch as well, but it allows you to have android/libs/[arm64-v8a armeabi-v7a] which is nice

[dballard]

Ah, as a follow up, this didn't work. Something in either therecipe/qt 's compiled code or the QT arm64 libs utterly fails on arm64, all we get are tons of crashes on anything more than trivial use. We spent days commenting out our QML code to the bare bones to get an app that wouldn't immediately crash. But the same code that runs with out problem on x86_86 linux and windows and arm7 android crashes all the time all over the place on android arm64. So there's some pretty big blockers to getting any app into android store here and we're completely blocked at this point :(