Controlling what ends up in assets\com.unity.addressables

Unity Engine
1

Hey, my APK build gets bloated by addressables that shouldn’t be there.

In my attempt to isolate the problem I did the following:

  • Create an empty scene (so that nothing holds a reference to an asset which will somehow make an addressable group end up in the build)
  • Create a new build for the addressables (‘Build > New Build > Default Build Script’)
  • Build an APK with this empty scene

If I unzip the APK and look at what’s in ‘assets/com.unity.addressables/’ I have the following:

$ du -hs unzip_apk/assets/com.unity.addressables/*
97M unzip_apk/assets/com.unity.addressables/Android
128K unzip_apk/assets/com.unity.addressables/catalog.json
49M unzip_apk/assets/com.unity.addressables/iOS
128K unzip_apk/assets/com.unity.addressables/link.xml
128K unzip_apk/assets/com.unity.addressables/settings.json
18M unzip_apk/assets/com.unity.addressables/StandaloneWindows64

In the Android folder I find an asset bundle of a group
In the iOS folder I find an asset bundle of another group
In the StandaloneWindows64 folder I find an asset bundle of another group

All those folders should be empty, especially the one for the other platforms.

Maybe there is some problem with some “addressables cache” that I have no Idea how to clear (running ‘Build > New Build > Default Build Script’ is the only thing I know to have a fresh new build of the addressables asset bundles)

I am running Unity 2020.1.0f1 and Addressables 1.8.4

2

some additional information:

I have deleted the ‘Library’ folder and restarted Unity, then I built the APK.
No improvement.

I notice the following:

The folders of the different platforms (Android, iOS, StandaloneWindows64) inside ‘assets\com.unity.addressables’ contain different asset bundles.

3

ok, so there was a folder for addressables in the StreamingAssets folder that was ending up in the ‘assets’ folder of the build. I deleted the folder and now the content of the APK is as expected.
I don’t know where this folder was coming from but what I know is that I did a lot of version upgrades of both Unity and the Addressables package in the late month as well as a lot of testing with the addressables system (creating groups, change their path, etc…)