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by izacus 1871 days ago
There's support for APK splits by locale, where you can upload a separate APK for each language which keeps the size down.

The AAB system criticized in this article will fix your issue too - Play Store delivery will automatically split APKs into per-locale slices and only download languages you need on your device.

1 comments

> There's support for APK splits by locale, where you can upload a separate APK for each language which keeps the size down

How does this work if the user changes the locale on their phone? I guess you need to redownload the APK? I would still prefer compressed localization for all languages, and uncompress the needed one at install/start/sometime if it needs to be mmaped. If the phone locale is changed, uncompress the new one at some point.

> The AAB system criticized in this article will fix your issue too - Play Store delivery will automatically split APKs into per-locale slices and only download languages you need on your device.

Sure. The system fixes a problem Google (or its predecessor, not sure about timing) created, and let linger for over a decade, by handing control of signing keys to Google. Not a great fix. Sure, de facto, Google could patch any app via Play Services which has lots of permissions, but if they control the signing keys, they can more easily meddle.