Google enforcing 64-bit compatibility

[Matt]

Hi all,

Not an expert on any of this so the answer is probably out there but I seem to be struggling to find it.

Yesterday I got an email from Google Play saying they are enforcing 64-bit requirements for all apps on the store.

Not massively urgent as it is not in effect until 1st August.

Just wondering how this is acheived in Droidscript or whether it is already compatible?

Regards,

Matt

[Steve Garman]

It will be quite a big job to get DroidScript ready for this change.

Google have a tendency to throw these things at us from time to time.

Unless you use any natives of your own in unofficial plugins (and you would know if you do) the only thing you really need to do is to ignore the change.

Any updates uploaded to Google Play from August will need to be built with some future version of DroidScript.

Hopefully, this will be seamless but there's a possibility some things may change in the meantime if it proves impossible to produce an exact 64bit equivalent of some of the current binaries.

[Dave]

Steve is correct.  This change will not affect most people as the vast majority of DroidScript is written in pure Java and will not be affected by the rule changes, apart from having to re-compile your apps with a newer version of DS after August (if you need to update them on Google Play).

However those that are using the 'NoDom' option or GLView may be affected if we face any trouble re-compiling the J2V8 libs for some reason (although I'm not expecting trouble).

It may also be possible to have a 'stay or execution' for our apps simply by targeting Android TV in the app resources anyway.  TVs are a platform that we have been planning to support for some time and it could allow 32 bit apps to go on living past the cut-off date for quite a while.

I'm not sure yet how Google Play will check for 64 bit libs exactly, so I'm not sure if any of the DS plugins that use .so libs will be affected, as these libs are packed into the assets of the APK and not the usual libs folders.  Most of the DS plugins use pure java and won't be affected anyway. 

[Chris]

I hope that we atleast start working on this soon. The last major change (Target Api) we had a few problems in the 'days' leading up to the deadline.

I've already started my plugin conversions, however I too wonder how they will detect the 64 bit libs. Will they simply not run on Android 9? Wondering.

[Netpower8]

Is GLView affected by this? Games on glview will be rejected on newer version of android?

[Steve Garman]

The next version of DS, to be issued soon, will default to using WebView/WebGL instead of GLES in preparation for the 64bit change.