Warning - Unity 2019.2 no longer supports Android 4.x with Intel CPU (libhoudini)

Unity Engine
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( TLDR: if you do have a user base with Android 4.x (which officially should be supported by Unity), DO NOT upgrade to 2019.2.x )

This is just a warning to fellow devs, Unity 2019.2 doesn’t work anymore with Android 4.x devices with Intel CPUs. The app will crash on launch.

I have opened a bug reporting it earlier this month, and their final official reply was “won’t fix”. I understand the company’s decision, I just think they should say it clearly on the changelog and/or compatibility, stating this so the developers know this before upgrading, knowing that they will become incompatible with certain devices. For me this is a huge hit, as I have dozens of thousands of players using Android 4.x, and thousands of those are using Intel CPU.

Just to be a bit more precise, the problem happens only when using houdini (libhoudini). If you build your game ticking x86 on player settings then this problem doesnt happen, since it wont use houdini. But ticking x86 has 2 major problems:

  • first x86 is deprecated by Unity, so it can vanish anytime
  • also if you tick x86, then the bundle is considered 32 bit (I dont know if this is a bug in Unity or not, but it has always been this way), and Google Play doesnt accept 32bit uploads anymore for new apps, and it will stop accepting 32bit uploads for all apps in a few months. It simply gets rejected when uploading, and there’s nothing you can do.

So the devs can either add x86 to the build and not distribute on Google Play (which doesnt make sense), or remove x86 build and crash on all Android 4.x devices with Intel CPU.

EDIT: forgot to mention this only applies to IL2CPP, I would guess it works fine on Mono, but havent tested

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I just started getting those libhoudini errors on my Google Play Console.

It’s annoying that Google simply wants to force us to stop serving x86 devices but those devices then can use something I never heard of to run our games, then this libhoudini starts to crash and is responsible for 100% of my crashes and can bring our games rank down because Google uses crash ratios to rank games…

Google forbids us from giving proper support and then let’s the users download unsupported versions of our apps and then blame us!

Is there even an solution to this? I think I’ll just stop serving android < 5 from now on…

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This is not really a Google problem, but a sequence of Unity bugs/issues. There’s nothing Google can do to fix, only Unity, but they said they won’t fix, so there’s not much we can do except either setting minSDK to Android 5+ as you suggested, or to use another game engine.