Provide x86 (32 and 64-bit?) Android Release binaries

@rmacnak-google

Internal: b/139750633

We learned in #2898 that Android x86 accounts for over 1% of Android devices, that's over a million devices.

This bug tracks doing so.

EDIT: See @rmacnak-google comments below. Implementing x86 Android Ahead of Time (AOT) compiled binaries will require a substantial amount of work in the Dart compiler. We could however implement JIT-based --release binaries for x86 with some minor plumbing work if needed.

See also #2089 which is a similar bug for iOS about providing more flavors of pre-built binaries.

@rmacnak-google

@rmacnak-google Are there any Dart limitations to supporting x86 Android Release binaries (i.e. does AOT work)? If so could you please link to such bugs?

Assuming no Dart limitations, it should be possible to work around us not currently providing these pre-built binaries by building the flutter engine yourself and using the --local-engine option to flutter:
https://github.com/flutter/engine/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

The Dart VM does not support AOT compilation for x86. AOT is supported for x64, ARM, ARM64 and MIPS.

(When targeting x86, we reference constants directly from instructions, but on all other architectures we load them through a constant pool, which allows us to handle their relocation. It is possible to do this on x86 as well, but it is a substantial change.)

The VM does support disabling the vm-service, etc for the JIT just as it does for AOT, so it would be possible to build a release version of the engine for x86 that uses the JIT.

when I tried to launch demo application I got the message
Profile and release builds are only supported on ARM targets.
Error running application on ASUS T00J.
It is very sadly that flutter is not for x86, because there are many devices on Intel atom.

Given the amount of work in the Dart VM, I suspect this is more realistically M4 than M3.

So, in the mean time I've been distributing a debug APK...not fun!

I've built Flutter manually in x86 release mode, but when I try to build the app it crashes saying precompilation isn't supported.

Is there a way to make a release build of Flutter with precompilation disabled?

So I managed to build it for X86 in release mode with AOT disabled using this patch:

diff --git a/shell/platform/android/BUILD.gn b/shell/platform/android/BUILD.gn
index 517b2a5e4..8800a4450 100644
--- a/shell/platform/android/BUILD.gn
+++ b/shell/platform/android/BUILD.gn
@@ -47,11 +47,11 @@ shared_library("flutter_shell_native") {
     "//garnet/public/lib/fxl",
     "//third_party/skia",
   ]
-  if (flutter_runtime_mode == "debug") {
+  # if (flutter_runtime_mode == "debug") {
     deps += [ "//dart/runtime:libdart_jit" ]
-  } else {
-    deps += [ "//dart/runtime:libdart_precompiled_runtime" ]
-  }
+  # } else {
+    # deps += [ "//dart/runtime:libdart_precompiled_runtime" ]
+  # }
 
   public_configs = [
     "$flutter_root:config",
diff --git a/tools/gn b/tools/gn
index fded2b0c2..30f3729d6 100755
--- a/tools/gn
+++ b/tools/gn
@@ -97,6 +97,7 @@ def to_gn_args(args):
           aot = True
     else:
       aot = False
+    aot = False
 
     if args.runtime_mode == 'debug':
         gn_args['dart_runtime_mode'] = 'develop'

Except, someone tried it, and it's stuck on a black screen. The logcat doesn't mention anything wrong. Is this even possible right now? 😐

Just to chime in to this, I've just had this issue where I needed to ship a new Android build ASAP for a certain app while I was out and about, and I didn't have a USB cable to connect my phone to my computer to smoke test the build. I was counting on being able to use the Android emulator but I found out about this limitation. It was a painful moment but I managed to get a cable from someone and test the build; had I not been at an Android meetup I'd have had some issues, though.

I think it's quite important to get to support Android release builds on emulators. I did not expect this limitation to be there, and I imagine most other devs wouldn't either. It's not a small issue
either in normal flows — why should I not be able to run my app on an emulator? What if I need to run screenshot tests on a CI without physical emulators? Or maybe auto-generate screenshots for the store listing, or any other number of legit workflows in which one needs to be able to install a release build on to an emulator.

Note: when this is eventually fixed, make sure to update the FAQ: https://github.com/flutter/website/pull/856/files

@Matt1700

@Matt1700 please file a bug with details on how you built it and your flutter version

@jonahwilliams

@jonahwilliams here's the issue #44425

I went through the steps described here: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/JIT-Release-Modes to build an x86 jit-release build. However, now I seem to be stuck on the step of figuring out how to use x86 jit-release build in my Flutter app. The instructions in the linked document talk about using the "flutter assemble" command, but there isn't much documentation that I can find on how to use that command. Any help with that?

@eseidel

@eseidel @Hixie @chinmaygarde @mit-mit
Do we need to update FAQs and remove this note? 👇

Note Flutter currently does not support building for x86 Android (issue #9253) directly, however apps built for ARMv7 or ARM64 run fine (via ARM emulation) on many x86 Android devices.

@apecoraro

@apecoraro have you found a way to do it?

@tarek360

@tarek360 nope, I eventually gave up because I found that the ARM emulation mode worked fine, at least on the Chromebook.

Any idea on when this is going to hit the stable channel?

If this is now supported please update the FAQ

Logged flutter/website#4039 for the FAQ issue

still not supported
flutter build apk --target-platform android-x86 is failing

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

What went wrong:
Could not determine the dependencies of task ':app:compileReleaseJavaWithJavac'.

Could not resolve all task dependencies for configuration ':app:releaseCompileClasspath'.
Could not find io.flutter:x86_release:1.0.0-540786dd51f112885a89792d678296b95e6622e5.
Required by:
project :app

Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output. Run with --scan to get full insights.
Get more help at https://help.gradle.org

BUILD FAILED in 1m 5s
Running Gradle task 'assembleRelease'...
Running Gradle task 'assembleRelease'... Done 66.6s
Gradle task assembleRelease failed with exit code 1

It's a shame that x86 (32 and 64-bit flavors) are not fully supported by Flatter on Android. Intel processor support is now more important than ever - my apps for example are used not only on Android phones and tablets, but also on Chromebooks, many of which have Intel processors, or under emulators (BlueStacks, NoxPlayer and others) on computers. x86 flavors installs of Android apps are on the rise constantly, at least in my experience. Please reconsider this strange policy decision.

Flutter haven't support AOT for x86 (32 bit) yet, but the app was built without this architecture still work fine because each Android x86 device has an "ARM emulation".
You can see image below (Asus zenfone 2), the CPU architecture is x86, but this device has an "ARM emulation" so the Instructions Sets also include armeabi-v7a which will help you run arm apps.

This thread has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. If you are still experiencing a similar issue, please open a new bug, including the output of flutter doctor -v and a minimal reproduction of the issue.

com.carriez.flutter_hbb 1.2.3

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Provide x86 (32 and 64-bit?) Android Release binaries #9253

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eseidelGoogle commented on Apr 6, 2017

eseidelGoogle commented on Apr 6, 2017

eseidelGoogle commented on Apr 6, 2017

rmacnak-google commented on Apr 6, 2017

danilNikolaenko1990 commented on Jun 12, 2017

eseidelGoogle commented on Sep 28, 2017

refi64 commented on Oct 15, 2017

refi64 commented on Nov 2, 2017

rock3r commented on Jan 17, 2018

mit-mit commented on Mar 6, 2018

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jonahwilliams commented on Nov 7, 2019

Matt1700 commented on Nov 8, 2019

apecoraro commented on Feb 13, 2020

tarek360 commented on Apr 16, 2020

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