Bundling assets for offline not working on ExpoKit 29?

Expo SDK
2

I’ve made a minimal example demonstrating this issue. It appears that asset bundling is not working with ExpoKit 29. Here is the github repo. This example is based on the “blank” starting point when you run expo init. All I did was add a single png image asset and change App.js to show that image in them middle of the screen. The example already has an assetBundlePattern and an assets folder in app.json that I did not change. I tried this particular example out an Android, building a signed release app. I did not do a release build on iOS yet just because I’d have to go through getting new certs, TestFlight, etc.

Test steps:

  1. Run expo start.
  2. Run the app on a device in Android Studio (debug mode).
  3. You’ll see a gray screen with a beer icon in the middle of it.
  4. Run expo publish.
  5. In Android Studio, go to Build → Generate Signed APK, follow the prompts to build an APK.
  6. Install the APK (I’m using the “prodMinSDK prodRelease” APK… I think that’s the one I want to use?).
  7. Put the device in airplane mode.
  8. Start up the app.
  9. You should not see an image- just a gray screen.

One other interesting/ odd thing - even if I leave the network on when I start the Android app, I still generally do not see the image. On my own app, with several screens, I’ve noticed that some images never appear on the release build since I’ve upgraded to Expo 29. Sometimes it’s changed from build-to-build. Generally, I always see a few smaller images that are used repeatedly and show up on a deeply-embedded dialog (maybe these are not timing out/ have multiple opportunities to load from the network). I do not see this particular issue on iOS - the images either load if I’m on the network, or fail to load if I’m not. In both cases, I’m not trying to prefetch images, as I’ve been advised that is not needed for standalone apps with assetBundlePatterns.

I’ve uploaded an example APK demonstrating this issue to my example, as well - it is in the root folder and is called “test.apk”.

Some other info:

  • I did notice that shell-app-manifest.json is showing a bunch of bundled assets (with randomized filenames, of course) for both platforms.
  • I was able to unzip the IPA on my original project and see the assets in there (with filenames that matched the ones in shell-app-manifest). I unzipped the Android APK, looked around a bunch of places, but don’t really know where to look, and didn’t find any of my image assets.