Bundle not included in APK from within Android Studio

[djibarian]

Description

Following on the issue #21132 I came to a slightly different problem. It seems that that issue refers to using react-native run-android, and that seems to finally work properly, i.e. the bundle is added to the APK properly.

But when building from Android Studio for release the bundle is still missing. I finally found the problem to be the same. build.gradle states that the default setting for jsBundleDirRelease is $buildDir/intermediates/assets/release, which is wrong. This must be changed to $buildDir/intermediates/assets/release/mergeReleaseAssets for Gradle to take the asset and add it to the APK.

So to avoid having to set jsBundleDirRelease to a proper value, it would be good to have the default value updated for this to work not only from the react-native run-android script, but also from Android Studio.

Version

0.66.4

Output of npx react-native info

System:
OS: macOS 12.2
CPU: (10) arm64 Apple M1 Pro
Memory: 195.25 MB / 16.00 GB
Shell: 5.8 - /bin/zsh
Binaries:
Node: 16.13.0 - /usr/local/bin/node
Yarn: 1.22.15 - /usr/local/bin/yarn
npm: 8.3.0 - /usr/local/bin/npm
Watchman: Not Found
Managers:
CocoaPods: 1.11.2 - /usr/local/bin/pod
SDKs:
iOS SDK:
Platforms: DriverKit 21.2, iOS 15.2, macOS 12.1, tvOS 15.2, watchOS 8.3
Android SDK:
API Levels: 26, 29, 30, 31, 32
Build Tools: 30.0.2, 30.0.3, 32.0.0
System Images: android-32 | Google APIs ARM 64 v8a
Android NDK: Not Found
IDEs:
Android Studio: 2021.1 AI-211.7628.21.2111.8092744
Xcode: 13.2.1/13C100 - /usr/bin/xcodebuild
Languages:
Java: 11.0.11 - /usr/bin/javac
npmPackages:
@react-native-community/cli: Not Found
react: ^17.0.2 => 17.0.2
react-native: ^0.66.4 => 0.66.4
react-native-macos: Not Found
npmGlobalPackages:
react-native: Not Found

Steps to reproduce

Just try to build for release in Android Studio. Then inspect the APK in app/build/intermediates/apk and find that the assets folder is missing.

Snack, code example, screenshot, or link to a repository

No response

[diego-paired]

Something similar happened to us when upgrading the Gradle plugin to v7 (from v4).
It's working again after downgrading to 4.2.2 (RN 0.67.1)

[cortinico]

This must be changed to $buildDir/intermediates/assets/release/mergeReleaseAssets for Gradle to take the asset and add it to the APK.

The logic for bundling the asset is here:

react-native/react.gradle

Lines 317 to 329 in 10199b1

	into ("assets/${targetPath}") {
	from(jsBundleDir)
	}
	// Workaround for Android Gradle Plugin 3.2+ new asset directory
	into ("merged_assets/${variant.name}/merge${targetName}Assets/out") {
	from(jsBundleDir)
	}
	// Workaround for Android Gradle Plugin 3.4+ new asset directory
	into ("merged_assets/${variant.name}/out") {
	from(jsBundleDir)
	}

I'm not sure what is the destination folder for AGP 7.x but if that is the case, we should be fine by just adding another rule there. Do you want to try submitting a PR for this @djibarian ?