How to use non-changing assets with managed workflows

How to / Third Party Tooling
1

Today, expo publish does not allow us use big files.

We will have two types of assets in our application. Some will be big and constant(will not be changed) and others will be smaller in terms of file size and can change time by time.

Our target is to keep the big files at the application side (like bare applications) and to refresh smaller ones from Expo’s CDN as they are updated.

First question is, is this something feasible with managed applications?

Second is how can this be achieved?

Thanks in advance,

Kaplan

2

This might help:

3

Thanks for the answer @wodin.

As per this reference, when we want to update our production application (as well as test one), we need to use expo publish. So your suggestion is very good, I agree.

But the problem at our side is; we will not have a backend server that can be used as a content delivery node.

That’s why we are searching a method, without loosing “on the air update” functionality for smaller assets (even only for JS code bundles, not images) but still to be able to ship the larger files(images) with the initial ios/android builds.

Apologies, maybe this detail should have been better in the original question.

4

I am not 100% sure of all the details regarding assets and publishing. I think by default publishing would bundle up all of the “large static” assets so your OTA updates would include them. I’m not sure if there’s a built-in way around this.

Would it be possible to download the large static assets when the app is first run and save them under the documentDirectory?

Then you could only include the small stuff in the actual APK/IPA and OTA updates.

5

Hi @wodin,

First thanks again for the answer.

Even though the needed bandwidth is considerably less than using expo publish with a custom node, that method would still requires a content delivery node.

And yes, it seems what we need is - unfortunately - a “way around”.
:confused:

6

Ah yes, of course. Sorry.

Is there no chance of using GitHub or Amazon S3 for distributing these static assets?

If that’s not an option I suggest you read up on all the documentation related to bundling assets in the Expo and Metro documentation to see if there’s some way to include the static assets only in the initial bundle in the APK/IPA and not in the OTA updates and also keep the static assets around even after installing an OTA update that doesn’t include them.

7

Thanks once again. I’ll continue to investigate through the documents…