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apks file produced with bundletool's --local-testing flag is not installed properly

See original GitHub issue

The problem

An apks file produced with bundletool’s --local-testing flag is not installed properly.

Environment

Appium 1.21

Details

The official way to install an aab file with Appium is to transform it into an apks archive. If the original aab file uses dynamically loaded assets, the apks file should be created with bundletool’s --local-testing flag as per documentation.

If I understand correctly, Appium “only installs the minimum set of resources, following the behavior of the appbundle feature”. In practice it means that additional assets aren’t installed and cannot be loaded.

Android docs suggest installing apks by running bundletool install-apks, and in this case all necessary files are installed.

Thus, I wanted to:

Ask whether there is a simple workaround to install the missing apks;
Propose to install apks with bundletool rathen than with adb.

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 2 years ago
Comments:6

Top GitHub Comments

1reaction

mykola-mokhnachcommented, Sep 24, 2021

At the time we were working on this feature the functionality of bundletool was quite limited. So we had to basically mimic some of its behaviours in order to still provide features we have for vanilla .apk files. Basically, to support these dynamic resources we just need to push them to a special place, where the system could find them later (e.g. mimic the original bundle tool behaviour): https://github.com/google/bundletool/blob/a7bcb5392a2fc074fd11551b7663643d1dbb0f1d/src/main/java/com/android/tools/build/bundletool/commands/InstallApksCommand.java#L194 The list of such dynamic resources could be retrieved from the special toc file, which is also included into the apks: https://github.com/google/bundletool/blob/06296d8ec009af6ec7d09f6da2cf54994fa3a89b/src/test/java/com/android/tools/build/bundletool/testing/ApkSetUtils.java#L45

Another option would be to use bundletool as is. I assume it’s already at the stage, where we have the necessary functionality there that we previously had using vanilla adb commands.

Marking as a feature request for now. Feel free to start working on it @rg-software

0reactions

mykola-mokhnachcommented, Sep 24, 2021

The patch has been merged and published to appium@beta

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