Play asset delivery for Cordova for android.

[Mr-Kumar-Abhishek]

Feature Request

Play asset delivery for Cordova for android typically install-time play asset delivery

Motivation Behind Feature

A lot of apps especially games which are ported from web utilize a lot of big assets. Since google only allows 200 MB of app size unless its assets are delivered by Play Asset Delivery, it will be very helpful if Cordova would have this feature while build time.

Feature Description

Typically Cordova should have play asset delivery setup configuration in its build configuration of build.json file, where a user can configure install-time fast-follow or on-demand play asset delivery for android.

Alternatives or Workarounds

I couldn't find any proper alternatives or work around

[breautek]

I reviewed https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/asset-delivery to try to determine how large or small this task might be and I think there's quite a bit involved.

It's not as simple as providing a module that is served as an asset pack for example.

At a high level, integrating Play assets would require:

1. Setting up a module in the native project for the asset pack(s). Each pack needs it's own android module.
2. Naturally copying the assets to the pack's resource folders.
3. Install-time assets are immediately available upon install, so install-time assets I don't think requires any additional special logic, but for fast-follow or on-demand will require APIs additonal APIs to:
4. check asset pack versions and download updates when necessary, an app update and asset pack versions may become out of sync, it's the app's responsibility to check and download the updates if necessary via android APIs.
5. Large asset packs (packs that are greater than 200mb requires user consent to download, so handling the user prompt is necessary)
6. Naturally, error handling will also be a requirement to gracefully error unknown asset packs or asset packs that hasn't been downloaded yet, or networking issues, etc.
7. Lastly I'm not sure if asset packs are accessible via the typical file:///android_assets or if we will need additional mappings so that webview can use assets from asset packs.

Due to the nature of adding in APIs for app updates and version checks, it would be much better if this was a plugin in my opinion, which can be updated more easily and independently of the core platform, but I'm not sure if a plugin can implement everything needed, it may require changes in the core platform too, particularly around the gradle build system management.

To be clear this isn't any acceptance or rejection of the feature request. This is just an initial analysis of what is likely needed to provide the feature.

[biodiv]

I think it would be a great benefit to include install-time assets to enable larger apps. The other delivery methods could be left unsupported first in my opinion. Points 4 to 6 mentioned by @breautek do not apply to install-time assets if I grasped the documentation correctly, and they can be up to 1.5GB in size.

I read through this https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/asset-delivery/integrate-java#groovy and came up with the following idea:

• enhance the gradle build system to handle one additional android module: AssetDelivery
• install-time configuration only
• in the cordova android template, add support for one additional folder (asset-delivery) on the same level as www. The user can then put the asset files in there. The asset-delivery folder can be left empty and does not have to exist.
• during build, copy these files on asset-delivery into the android module according to the spec
• make them accessible from the webview, I do not know yet how to do this.

I also read through the cordova plugin documentation, but could not figure out a way how to implement the changes required for the gradle build system with the plugin approach. Maybe, if the focus is on install-time assets, the plugin approach is not so important. However, I have no experience with cordova plugins.

I'll give it a shot, but I can't promise I will succeed. Any thoughts are appreciated.

[biodiv]

I created a plugin for handling install-time asset delivery:

https://github.com/biodiv/cordova-plugin-assetpack

This should enable android apps up to 2GB. I tried to maintain cross-platform compatibility, meaning using the asset pack plugin on android does not break the paths for builds for other platforms.