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libmapbox-maps.so grew ~38% (+18 MB across ABIs) between 11.30.4 and 11.31.1

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
22/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
android, cpp, kotlin
Domain
mobile, mobile-dev, performance

Research direction

The report compares stripped libmapbox-maps.so sizes inside android-core-ndk27 AARs (11.30.4 vs 11.31.1) and ELF sections, especially .text. Start from the gl-native / NDK27 build configuration used for those artifacts and whether optimization, inlining, or LTO flags changed. Done is a confirmed cause and a path to shrink the library, not an app-side workaround. This is maintainer-level native build work, not a first-issue patch.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug :beetle:

Environment

  • Android OS version: All (build-time / APK size issue)
  • Devices affected: All
  • Maps SDK Version: 11.31.1 and later (com.mapbox.maps:android-ndk27), compared with 11.30.4

Observed behavior and steps to reproduce

After updating from com.mapbox.maps:android-ndk27:11.30.4 to 11.31.1, with no other native changes, our release APK grew by about 20 MB. Almost all of the difference is libmapbox-maps.so from com.mapbox.maps:android-core-ndk27:

ABI 11.30.4 11.31.1 Change
arm64-v8a 12.93 MB 17.83 MB +4.90 MB
armeabi-v7a 8.87 MB 12.19 MB +3.32 MB
x86 14.80 MB 19.36 MB +4.56 MB
x86_64 14.28 MB 19.35 MB +5.07 MB

That is about +18 MB in a universal APK, and about +5 MB per device for arm64. The size stays at this level in 11.32.0. libmapbox-common.so (common 24.30.4 to 24.31.1) is unchanged (6.67 MB to 6.64 MB on arm64-v8a).

To reproduce: compare the jni/<abi>/libmapbox-maps.so sizes inside android-core-ndk27-11.30.4.aar and android-core-ndk27-11.31.1.aar.

Expected behavior

The 11.31.0 and 11.31.1 release notes list small features and bug fixes, so we would expect the native library size to stay close to 11.30.4.

Notes / preliminary analysis

Both libraries are stripped, so this is not debug symbols. Comparing ELF section sizes of the arm64-v8a libmapbox-maps.so:

Section 11.30.4 11.31.1 Change
.text 8.45 MB 12.73 MB +4.28 MB (+51%)
.gcc_except_table 0.43 MB 0.75 MB +0.33 MB
.rela.dyn 0.69 MB 0.95 MB +0.26 MB
.data.rel.ro 0.24 MB 0.33 MB +0.09 MB
.eh_frame 1.51 MB 1.58 MB +0.07 MB
.eh_frame_hdr 0.39 MB 0.23 MB -0.16 MB

Most of the growth is compiled code in .text, with exception tables almost doubling. That looks more like a change in build configuration (optimization level, inlining or LTO settings) than new functionality. Could you confirm whether the gl-native build flags changed in 11.31, and whether the size can be brought back down?

We have only checked the -ndk27 variant, so we don't know whether the default (NDK 23) artifact is affected as well.

Dominant language
Kotlin
Stars
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Forks
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