Rive-Android Native Library size increased significantly

[pratiksahu18]

Please find the attached report below
Comparison is between 10.2.0 <> 11.1.2

[ErikUggeldahl]

Hi @pratiksahu18. This was also independently reported through our enterprise support channels and I've done some investigation.

The reason for the increase is including debug symbols in version 11+. The lines in particular that are responsible are here. The intent was for only debug builds to include this information, but due to quirks in Gradle, this leaked into release builds as well.

The good news is these symbols can be automatically stripped during your build, but in order for that to happen, you need to have an NDK installed. If you don't have one installed, you'll see a message like the following in your build logs: Unable to strip ... due to missing strip tool for ABI 'arm64-v8a'. Packaging it as is.

If you use the NDK in your project, it will strip using the version you've pinned. If you don't, it will use the version preferred by AGP, according to this table:

AGP Version	NDK Version
AGP 9.0+	NDK 28.2.13676358
AGP 8.3+	NDK 27.0.11718014
AGP 4.1+	NDK 21.0.6113669

If you install that preferred version of NDK, it should strip as expected and have no size penalty for your application.

As for next steps, we'll be looking to rollback this change in a forthcoming release and reconsider how we distribute debug symbols. In the mean time, the above steps will be included in documentation.

[pratiksahu18]

Hi @ErikUggeldahl , I checked in my project and we are using ndk version 27.2.12479018.
We are getting these logs still during build. Do I have to use specific ndk version?

Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libandroidx.graphics.path.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Could not find Bloaty. Install Bloaty for more information about native libraries.
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libavif_android.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libbb7cbb.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libbureau-b1h1.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libc++shared.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libimage_processing_utiljni.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libndkdatacollector.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/librive-android.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libsecure_keys.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libsurface_util_jni.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libsystem-check.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libtoolChecker.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libndp-detector.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null
Could not find Bloaty. Install Bloaty for more information about native libraries.
Unable to parse library
Looking for unstripped file for /lib/arm64-v8a/libtensorflowlite_jni.so. Matched: null
Parsing unstripped library at: null

[pratiksahu18]

Additionally I am building release variant so shouldn't this be removed automatically since the debug rules won't be applicable in that case?

[ErikUggeldahl]

I'm not familiar with those logs, but the task you want to make sure is running is strip<Variant>DebugSymbols, and specifically looking at the output from that. The results will be stored in <Your app>/build/intermediates/stripped_native_libs/.

If you're referring to the debug { block, unfortunately that isn't being respected by our build and even release builds have debug symbols included. But yes, when you build release, you should expect it will attempt to strip and will fail if it can't find the expected NDK version to do it.

[pratiksahu18]

@ErikUggeldahl Post removing the debug symbols the size bump is still significant, 500kb.
Can you provide what changes are added in this which is causing the bump

[ErikUggeldahl]

Around ~230kb of that is the addition of the Luau VM which enables scripting. It's hard for me to comment specifically beyond that without deeper analysis, but certainly the DEX size would have increased some by the inclusion of the new Android API. We plan to carve this out into modules so that you can include just the new version and save the binary weight of legacy, or vice versa. We may also explore flavor variants that exclude scripting and audio in the future, but not at this time.