My recent post "The end of B4A as we know it (new google play billing version and mandatory app bundle)" now that I look at it was way of an overstatement. I may have drove Erel nuts forcing him to characterize the title "hysterical nonsense" (which was way of an overstatement too as it came from a normally gentle man) but that was clearly not my intention.
My intention was expressed in "...as we know it..." part of the title which turned out for the time being to be also wrong. Google starting sometime in 2021 will only allow the developers to post apps in Android App Bundle format (.aab - we will take later a look at that) and I thought that this was the case for all the Android Markets that exist out there. As it turns out Google clearly states that this will not be the case for the other markets which for the time being will continue to accept .apk format for new apps. Thus the only thing that has to be implemented in B4A is export in .aab format which seems to be fairly simple at the end.
Now let us take a look in Android App Bundle format. If you open your .apk file with winrar or winzip (it is a zip file) you will see that there is a classes.dex file (which interest us more) and some other files and directories). Now let's take a look at the Android App Bundle (.aab) format:
As someone can clearly see in the most simple form (if you don't have different implementations and libs for different processors and different assets for each implementation) it is just a zip file with a bit of rearranging of the folders of .apk and addition of some more files and folders. The only new thing is the addition of Module Protocol Buffer files (.pb) which are files that contain meta data. With Erel's capabilities I suppose it is a matter of a week or two at the most to add the creation of .aab file in B4A.
Anyway, I felt I should have cleared things earlier about my earlier post but it is better late than never.
Here is a page with more reference for the .aab format for everyone interested:
developer.android.com
My intention was expressed in "...as we know it..." part of the title which turned out for the time being to be also wrong. Google starting sometime in 2021 will only allow the developers to post apps in Android App Bundle format (.aab - we will take later a look at that) and I thought that this was the case for all the Android Markets that exist out there. As it turns out Google clearly states that this will not be the case for the other markets which for the time being will continue to accept .apk format for new apps. Thus the only thing that has to be implemented in B4A is export in .aab format which seems to be fairly simple at the end.
Now let us take a look in Android App Bundle format. If you open your .apk file with winrar or winzip (it is a zip file) you will see that there is a classes.dex file (which interest us more) and some other files and directories). Now let's take a look at the Android App Bundle (.aab) format:
As someone can clearly see in the most simple form (if you don't have different implementations and libs for different processors and different assets for each implementation) it is just a zip file with a bit of rearranging of the folders of .apk and addition of some more files and folders. The only new thing is the addition of Module Protocol Buffer files (.pb) which are files that contain meta data. With Erel's capabilities I suppose it is a matter of a week or two at the most to add the creation of .aab file in B4A.
Anyway, I felt I should have cleared things earlier about my earlier post but it is better late than never.
Here is a page with more reference for the .aab format for everyone interested:
About Android App Bundles | Android Developers
developer.android.com
