Problems testing APK expansion library

Question

I\'ve integrated the APK Expansion file download library from Google into my project, and it works more or less OK (except a few minor gotchas, which have been reported by o

Answer 1

The APK + Expansion workflow has other non-intuitive and undocumented gotchas, besides the propagation time described by the author:

1. Increase the APK versionCode but keep using the same (old) Expansion file. It seems that if you do not upload the new APK to your developer console, the download won't work from the updated app (directly installed using adb). The error message is not helpful either: "download failed because the resources could not be found". To me it looks like Google is saying "Ok, I know about this Expansion file version, but I don't know about this app version". I didn't find any reference to this requirement in the current documentation.

2. New APK uploaded to developer console seems to "capture" the Expansion file association from the old APK. Example: If you delete the new APK (but keeping the old, which has the same version as the Expansion), the Expansion file seems to go away as well. Perhaps they thought the workflow would be "we must associate the Expansion with the new APK, so the developer is free to erase the old APK without any problem". Still this is another gotcha that doesn't seem to be described anywhere.

These are preliminary notes. I submitted a support request which might confirm these findings so I will post updates here when (if?) they reply...