Google Abandons APKs for AABs

Google will be abandoning the .apk file format for .aab format. Since we've used APKs for 13 years, this makes me sad. Unsure of what this means for side-loading, though there isn't likely to be a huge change.

Android's app file format, the APK (Android PacKage), has been with us since the 2008 launch of Android. It's portable, easy to create since it's just a structured .zip file, and widely supported by a variety of tools. Windows 11 is even going to support the format as part of its upcoming

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. Google, though, doesn't want APKs to be the way to publish an Android app anymore. Google's

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recaps how, starting in August, new apps being uploaded to the Play Store will need to use the new Android App Bundles (AAB) format to distribute apps. This sounds like just the beginning, and Google says that App Bundles "will replace the APK as the standard publishing format."

Android App Bundles were introduced to the Android ecosystem in 2018, and I wrote a big section about them in the

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. The basic sales pitch is that Android devices have plenty of different hardware and language combinations that apps have to support, and shipping all of that code to every individual device is a waste of space. Android supports over 150 languages,

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CPU architectures (ARMv7, ARMv8, x86, and x86_64), and several screen resolution buckets. It's common to pile all of this into a single APK (though sometimes they are split up by CPU architecture), but doing so means each device gets a lot of code and resources that are irrelevant for its specific combination of CPU, locale, and screen size. While this waste of storage space doesn't matter much on high-end phones with good Internet connections, it can be a big deal for cheaper, storage-limited devices and in places where speedy Internet is hard to come by.

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Google will be abandoning the .apk file format for .aab format.

I assume It's backward compatible with every app specifically designed to run APK files.

I wonder if this will make it harder or, seemingly, easier to reverse and crack applications, and otherwise manipulate the projects. It's got to be essentially the same, virtually, as the programs would still behave the same after installation and wouldn't actually change their behavior, client-side at least. Some developers might be upset by this change but it can be relatively trivial to adapt their frameworks to account for the library changes.