Notes on dealing with Google Play's 64-bit requirement in an old cocos project

There was an old project where, to solve Google’s 64-bit requirement, I was about to upgrade cocos — then found out I didn’t need to. Apparently you just need to compile a 64-bit version. I vaguely remembered deleting arm64-v8a back then.

Google’s guide: https://developer.android.com/distribute/best-practices/develop/64-bit#test\_your\_app\_on\_64-bit\_hardware describes three scenarios — building with Gradle, with CMake, and with ndk-build — and they differ. Based on my testing, cocos2dx uses the ndk-build mode, which depends on the PROP_APP_ABI setting in gradle.properties.

// Your app’s build.gradle
apply plugin: ‘com.android.app’

android {
   compileSdkVersion 27
   defaultConfig {
       appId "com.google.example.64bit"
       minSdkVersion 15
       targetSdkVersion 28
       versionCode 1
       versionName "1.0"
       ndk.abiFilters 'armeabi-v7a','arm64-v8a','x86','x86\_64'
// ...    

Post: [Support for 64bit on cocos2d-x on Android](https://discuss.cocos2d-x.org/t/critical-support-for-64bit-on-cocos2d-x-on-android/45516/14):

in Application.mk:
APP_ABI := armeabi armeabi-v7a arm64-v8a

In gradle.properties:
PROP_APP_ABI=armeabi-v7a:arm64-v8a

In build.gradle(Module: myapp):
abiFilters ‘armeabi-v7a’, ‘arm64-v8a’

What I actually did:

1. Changed the config to add arm64-v8a

PROP_APP_ABI=armeabi-v7a:arm64-v8a

2. Upgraded Gradle and studio, raised the minimum sdk to 16 and the compile sdk to 28 3. Rewrote some Java code, deprecated method 4.

APP_STL := c++_static

arguments ‘NDK_TOOLCHAIN_VERSION=clang’

6. All the compile statements were no longer supported, so I changed them to implementation or api

dependencies {
implementation fileTree(dir: ‘../java/libs’, include: [‘*.jar’])
}