[mono-android] Feature Request - Shared Release Runtime Deployment

[Jonathan Pryor]

On Feb 9, 2012, at 7:39 PM, Roy Goode wrote:
> I wonder if it's possible to make the official Shared Runtime as an app released on the Android Market as an alternative to the bundled runtime?

<Insert maniacal laughter here>

In theory, there's nothing [0] preventing this. In practice, we haven't gone two releases without having some form of API/ABI break. We are working on improving that (hopefully 4.2 will be the last release which breaks API in an incompatible manner), but I don't hold out much hope for things being "stable" long enough for a shared runtime package to be plausible on the Android Market, not anytime soon.

This isn't to say that these things aren't insurmountable. I just wouldn't expect it anytime soon. :-)

 - Jon

[0] except for gigantic app sizes and user complexity [1]... The Mono.Android.DebugRuntime-debug.apk package, containing BCL + ARMv5, ARMv7, and x86 runtimes is "only" 25MB in size. We already have requests for MIPS support, which will make that larger still, and then there's the per-API level Mono.Android.Platform.apk, which is another 12-16MB. Assuming the end user only downloads apps which require a single API level, you're still requiring that they download 37+MB just to run your app, as opposed to the ~2+MB size that is currently required.

[1] Then there's the user complexity side. We'd either need to have a "bootstrap installer" embedded into apps to direct the user to the Android Market to download the packages, or you'd need to document that they download _three_ packages -- Runtime, Platform, and App.