Generate "universal" apk for specific config.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I want to be able to generate a single “universal” apk that contains only the split APKs that I select via a device config and not all of them. e.g. I would want a universal APK with just the arm64-v8a ABI, or I want a “universal” apk with just xhdpi resources.

Describe the solution you’d like

Either the ability to allow --connected-device and --device-spec with subsets of that configurations e.g. (only abi)

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

Manually/Automatically merging a subset of split APKs.

Additional context

I understand that the PlayStore would never generate and serve such an apk but we would need to generate that APKs for different release channels and want to generate them form the same built Bundle and not build another binary.

[plecesne]

This was an attempt at using a feature from the Android platform to put APKs on the system image compressed. However, there were some bugs in the feature and thus cannot be used as is. I would advise against using this option, we are likely to remove it from bundletool soon.

[plecesne]

Great question.

Yes indeed, the --mode=system has been introduced for the system image purpose.

As for the differences:

• --mode=standalone would include the string for all languages, while --mode=system would include only the languages specified in the device spec (or all of them if you leave that field empty). In the latter case, Play Store will download the strings for languages defined in the system settings at the earliest opportunity, and developers using a custom language picker also have the possibility to download the needed languages manually using the Play Core SDK.
• Standalone APKs are meant to be deployed to pre-L devices, while System APKs are targeted for recent versions of Android, so there may be optimizations done on system APKs that are disabled for standalone APKs. One that comes to mind is native support for multidex, but there may be others.