Xamarin-android: Crash reports in Google Play: UnsatisfiedLinkError

[tipa]

Steps to Reproduce

I am receiving app crash reports in Google Play after I switched from uploading 2 APKs (for 32 & 64bit) to an .aab Bundle. No other major changes in the code and project settings were made compared to the previous app version.
Affected devices (so far) are Galaxy A50, Galaxy J4+, LG G6, Galaxy S10, Galaxy J7 (all running Android 9)

Expected Behavior

App loads without any problems during startup

Actual Behavior

App crashes with java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: 
  at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0 (Runtime.java:1016)
  at java.lang.System.loadLibrary (System.java:1669)
  at mono.MonoPackageManager.LoadApplication (Unknown Source:220)
  at mono.MonoRuntimeProvider.attachInfo (Unknown Source:41)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.installProvider (ActivityThread.java:6786)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.installContentProviders (ActivityThread.java:6333)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.handleBindApplication (ActivityThread.java:6248)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.access$1200 (ActivityThread.java:240)
  at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage (ActivityThread.java:1797)
  at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage (Handler.java:106)
  at android.os.Looper.loop (Looper.java:214)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.main (ActivityThread.java:7094)
  at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke (Native Method)
  at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run (RuntimeInit.java:494)
  at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main (ZygoteInit.java:975)

Version Information

The app was build with VS 16.4.0 and the Xamarin.iOS version that came with it

Other

  <PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU' ">
    <Optimize>true</Optimize>
    <OutputPath>bin\Release</OutputPath>
    <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport>
    <WarningLevel>4</WarningLevel>
    <AndroidUseSharedRuntime>false</AndroidUseSharedRuntime>
    <AotAssemblies>true</AotAssemblies>
    <EnableLLVM>true</EnableLLVM>
    <AndroidEnableMultiDex>false</AndroidEnableMultiDex>
    <AndroidSupportedAbis />
    <AndroidLinkMode>Full</AndroidLinkMode>
    <AndroidHttpClientHandlerType>Xamarin.Android.Net.AndroidClientHandler</AndroidHttpClientHandlerType>
    <AndroidTlsProvider>btls</AndroidTlsProvider>
    <BundleAssemblies>true</BundleAssemblies>
    <AndroidEnableSGenConcurrent>true</AndroidEnableSGenConcurrent>
    <NoWarn>IDE0044</NoWarn>
    <AndroidDexTool>d8</AndroidDexTool>
    <AndroidLinkTool>r8</AndroidLinkTool>
    <EmbedAssembliesIntoApk>true</EmbedAssembliesIntoApk>
    <AndroidUseAapt2>true</AndroidUseAapt2>
    <AndroidCreatePackagePerAbi>false</AndroidCreatePackagePerAbi>
    <AndroidEnableProfiledAot>false</AndroidEnableProfiledAot>
    <DefineConstants>TRACE</DefineConstants>
    <LangVersion>8.0</LangVersion>
    <AndroidPackageFormat>aab</AndroidPackageFormat>
  </PropertyGroup>

[tipa]

Any idea what the problem is? I also got reports from users that the app won't start on Chromebooks any more.

[claudioredi]

I'm seeing the same :( It only happens with Android 9 so far.

[jonathanpeppers]

@tipa or @claudioredi can you reproduce the issue? Or only have reports from Google Play?

Can you post the adb logcat output?

[claudioredi]

@jonathanpeppers I only see it on google play, sorry :(

[tipa]

Same here, not able to reproduce the issue, only reports from Google Play.
Seems to affect Android 9 devices exclusively and mainly Samsung Galaxy Phones + Tablets.

[radekdoulik]

We are unable to investigate this issue further without the requested information.

Hopefully you found a resolution meanwhile! If not, please try the latest version of the product and if the problem still occurs, reply with the requested information and reopen this issue.

[wouterattoptal]

I'm also seeing this issue through Google Play only, on a small number of devices (but users seem persistent, and keep trying the app), and since I've changed to aab.

Are you guys saying this is closed since we don't have a local repro?

[MarvinFrankenfeld]

@radekdoulik We are also having Google Play Crashes regarding UnsatisfiedLinkError:

We are using App Bundle and Visual Studio 2019 16.4.5 targeting Android 10.

These two are the most popular crashes in our app and we don't know how to solve it or investigate further as we are not able to reproduce these crashes even with the same test devices with same Android versions.

So what do you suggest in order to solve these issues?

[BioTurboNick]

I'm also seeing this error. App has worked fine for a long time with over a thousand installs. Just seen on one device so far, four times, a Galaxy J7 Neo with Android 9. I also recently switched to an app bundle. Occurs in loadLibrary0, identical stack trace. VS 2019 16.5.5 was used to make it.

Just going to link to the currently open issue: https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android/issues/4557

[MarvinFrankenfeld]

@radekdoulik , any updates here? Crashes still occuring and I can see we are not the only ones having this kind of problem.

[holecekp]

I have the same problem. Any updates?

[JesperBalslev]

Same issue here - after switching to app bundle. So perhaps the issue is with app bundle?

[bellissimo]

This stack trace after updating an app definitely happens regardless of whether you use an app bundle or not. I always get a handful of these after every update I do. So it is possible that the aab aspect is a red herring, and the simple act of updating the app has led to the problem.

For the people who are experiencing it, how many existing installs do you have, and how many users are affected after updating?

[JesperBalslev]

Maybe related to ProGuard?

[bellissimo]

I doubt it. I used to get this error even before I used ProGuard. I think the issue is rather more fundamental in that one or more of the shared libraries are simply not present.

[BioTurboNick]

FWIW, I didn't have an instance after any other update. ~1500 active installs

[bellissimo]

How many users had this failure out of the 1500?

[BioTurboNick]

1: https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android/issues/4028#issuecomment-639226156

[jonathanpeppers]

See: https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android/issues/5149

Does anyone have a crash reporter like Firebase.Crashlytics setup? It could potentially give us more information. Right now we don't really know what is going on here.

Looking at AppCenter's SDK, I don't think it could possibly catch this crash because it occurs before any managed C# code runs.

[BioTurboNick]

@jonathanpeppers I am using AppCenter and correct, it did not catch it.

[bellissimo]

Yep, it does not get through to AppCenter, as you may expect since it does not seem to get as far as starting the app.

Regarding the App Bundle aspect of this, as far as I understand it the AAR is simply used to generate an APK specific to the device, using bundletool. So it is hard to see how the AAR could be a cause of this issue, unless there is a bug with bundletool.

[holecekp]

I have also the same problem. I did some research on the statistics provided by Google Play Console and my suspicion is that these crashes happen when the application is installed on a new device (not updates). I have thought that this is problem of Xamarin.Forms so I created an issue with more details there (https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/issues/12218#issuecomment-698899776)

[jonathanpeppers]

I was able to use the latest Xamarin.Firebase.Crashlytics NuGet package and get crash reports of UnsatisfiedLinkError.

I listed a few manual steps for this here: https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android/issues/5149#issuecomment-716846107

Would someone be able to try this in their app? Thanks!

[jonathanpeppers]

Has anyone been able to try Xamarin.Firebase.Crashlytics?

I realized that my Github repo wasn't public, but I fixed that so it is public now:

https://github.com/jonathanpeppers/xamarin-crashes

The important bit is moving the ContentProvider so it runs first and can report on crashes in Xamarin.Android startup:

https://github.com/jonathanpeppers/xamarin-crashes/blob/34f98fbf8f7d29df7efb953b715a3502e72c4aab/MyFirebaseApp/Properties/AndroidManifest.xml#L8

[jonathanpeppers]

@CDrosos when I looked AppCenter doesn't use an Android ContentProvider written in Java/Kotlin to configure itself. It appears to only be configured in C# and can't possibly report on a native crash in Xamarin.Android startup. It is crashing before any managed C# code is running.

[CDrosos]

I also have those UnsatisfiedLinkError crashes in my app, many of them.
I have noticed however this:
In Google Play Console all those errors appear in the Crashes & ANR section when no filter is selected. If i select the filter: "Installed from Google Play" then all those crashes disappear.
Does this mean i don't actually have to worry about this crash? Is it maybe being installed automatically from some other free android store market? How can an app being installed from another source other than Google Play? i haven't put the app or the apk on another store.

[BioTurboNick]

I'm seeing the same as @CDrosos : The errors seem to occur outside Play Store installs.

[jonathanpeppers]

@CDrosos / @BioTurboNick if these installs are outside Google Play, there is probably one these happening:

1. A user is sideloading your .apk on a device your app doesn't really support.
2. Someone is pirating your app, and submitting it to a _different_ app store.
3. You are using Android app bundles, and users are trying to sideload your app, but are completely doing it wrong. I can't imagine they would be able to run bundletool correctly or get the proper set of .apk files for their specific device. You would generally need to install 4 .apk files for an app bundle manually, if you aren't using bundletool.

When I worked for a different company, our games were commonly pirated in China and other countries. So much so, we made an official version for China with custom content and submitted this version to 20+ of their app stores.

[holecekp]

@jonathanpeppers You are right. I have also a plenty of these error reports but I could not believe that these are from a pirated, or sideloaded app. I could not see a reason why would someone bother pirating my application when it is free and it is also available also on AppGallery for Huawei devices that cannot install apps from Google Play (however, this is a slightly modified version with the same name but with a suffix in the identifier, so I can rule out that these errors are be from the AppGallery version).

Then I tried to search my application on apkpure.com and I found it! It had been uploaded by someone called "Phạm Tam". So you are right. These errors are not from the official version.

[MarvinFrankenfeld]

@jonathanpeppers , in our case the crashes also appear for officially installed apps by Google Play. Unfortunately we are using MS AppCenter and cannot use Firebase.

[CDrosos]

@MarvinFrankenfeld maybe is a good idea to use bundletool to create the apks from bundle manually and debug those apks for errors. Bundletool documentation suggests that also