How to build 64-bit Xamarin Android Application

Google announced all Android app should support 64-bit architectures from Aug 1, 2019. 64-bit CPUs deliver faster, richer experiences for your users. Google Play will continue to support 32-bit apps for now, but as of August 1, 2019 all new apps and updates that include native code must have 64-bit versions as well as 32-bit versions when publishing to Google Play. This ruling applies to apps written in native, Xamarin or apps with links to third-party native libraries.

Supported ABIs

Android application supports four ABIs that can be selected when building mobile app. You can Select which ABIs your application supports in the project android options properties, if no ABI is specified, “armeabi-v71” is used in release build and As of Xamarin.Android 9.2, armeabi is no longer supported.

1. armeabi-v7a – ARM-based CPUs with hardware floating-point operations and multiple CPU (SMP) devices.
2. arm64-v8a – CPUs based on the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture.
3. x86 – CPUs that support the x86 (or IA-32) instruction set.
4. x86_64 – CPUs that support the 64-bit x86 .

You can follow the below steps for select 64-bit android application in the Visual studio and Visual studio mac.

Visual Studio in Windows machine:

Step 1: You can open Visual Studio in the windows machine, right-click on android project and select Properties. 

Step 2: Select the Android Options tab and Click the Advanced button and, check the architectures that you want to support.

Visual Studio Mac:

You can open Visual Studio mac in the mac machine and open/ create new project Android project.

Step 1:  Right-click on Android project under the Solution Explorer and select Properties.

Step 2: Under the Android Options page check the Packaging properties section and Click the Advanced button and select the architectures that you want to support:

How to check if your device is 32-bit or 64-bit?

You can also check if your phone is 64-bit in android using the app Antutu Benchmark. While this is a benchmarking app, you can just use it to view your device information. Open Antutu Benchmark and click on “info”.

Summary:

The android applications already support 64-bit, no need to do anything, If you haven’t yet, you can change the as per the above steps as soon as possible. I hope this article will help you. Please leave your feedback/query using the comments box, and if you like this article, please share it with your friends.