Publish two versions of an app in the Google Play store: one with Crosswalk, one without?

1

Hi all,

I’m testing with 2 Android devices (a Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone from April 2014 and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, GT-P3100 from 2012) and one iOS device (iPhone 4S).

With the Samsung Galaxy S3 performance is just fine, without using Crosswalk. It’s from 2014 and you can see it’s a “high end” device. I’ve tried adding Crosswalk but I don’t see any difference.

With the Galaxy Tab it’s a difference story, performance was really inadequate, page transitions were lagging and taking 3 or 4 seconds or more, sometimes you need to tap 2 times, etc, a bad user experience. Then I added Crosswalk and I could see a noticeable improvement. Still not super fast but more smooth and predictable, a much more enjoyable user experience.

Now the question:

Since Crosswalk makes your app a hefty 20 megabyte (Crosswalk Lite still weighs in at 14 megabyte I believe), and I do NOT need it for the more high-end devices, would it be possible to publish 2 versions of an app in the Google Play store and have the correct version get downloaded somehow?

Note: I’ve found part of the answer already here:

http://developer.android.com/google/play/publishing/multiple-apks.html

I suppose I should then use the “multiple APK support” feature with the “API level” filter.

Then the only remaining question is if anyone has experience with this and if this approach would be recommended or not (it does make things quite a bit more complex for myself obviously).

By the way, if I understand correctly this only applies to Android, for iOS I don’t need Crosswalk, right?

2

How would you differentiate between low-end and high-end devices?
API level filter would not help, you can have a low-end device running very recent API.

3

True, but chances are that a higher API level would run a more modern Android and WebView (and as a result also be more likely to run on a newer device). It’s not a 100% certainty but a high probability.

On the other hand it’s certainly simpler to just go for one version e.g. using Crosswalk Lite. Lite is supposedly half the size of the full Crosswalk so let’s say 10 MB instead of 20 MB. For me that would be acceptable.

Performance on the Galaxy Tab (from 2012) without Crosswalk was plain terrible I must say, with Crosswalk it was passable.