"Failed to extract resources needed by Il2CPP" (Unity 5.3.5)

For various testing reasons I need to manually unpack and pack IL2CPP APK built with Unity 5.3.5f1 but the “repacked” APK will always fail very soon with message:

“Error: Failed to extract resources needed by Il2CPP”

Logcat doesn’t contain more information but it seems that this error happens very soon in the execution process.

This error happens even if I don’t make any changes in the APK contents - just unzipping and zipping it again with no compression (i.e., compression method “store”) leads to this error.

I tried several zip tools, like WinRAR, WinZip, 7z, “Linux zip”, several compression parameters, and it is all the same. I tried to install the APK on many devices with the same result.

I made many repacking in the past and this never happens with APK that uses Mono runtime. I wonder why the IL2CPP initialization is so sensitive and what conditions should be met to make it working.

Hello, of course many years have passed, but I have come across the fact that when I sign an application in unity with some old keys, the admob advertisement refuses to show. I intend to try to build an application with a debug keystore, and sign it myself. But when installing a self-signed application, I get the same error as you

Tell me please, did you find a solution to this problem then?