Wednesday 22 October 2014

understanding Zipalign command in Android SDK

Documentation

Documentation states it clearly

zipalign is an archive alignment tool that provides important optimization to Android application (.apk) files. The purpose is to ensure that all uncompressed data starts with a particular alignment relative to the start of the file. Specifically, it causes all uncompressed data within the .apk, such as images or raw files, to be aligned on 4-byte boundaries. This allows all portions to be accessed directly with mmap() even if they contain binary data with alignment restrictions. The benefit is a reduction in the amount of RAM consumed when running the application.

This tool should always be used to align your .apk file before distributing it to end-users. The Android build tools can handle this for you. When using Eclipse with the ADT plugin, the Export Wizard will automatically zipalign your .apk after it signs it with your private key . The build scripts used when compiling your application with Ant will also zipalign your .apk, as long as you have provided the path to your keystore and the key alias in your project ant.properties file, so that the build tools can sign the package first.

Cautious Note: zipalign must only be performed after the .apk file has been signed with your private key. If you perform zipalign before signing, then the signing procedure will undo the alignment. Also, do not make alterations to the aligned package. Alterations to the archive, such as renaming or deleting entries, will potentially disrupt the alignment of the modified entry and all later entries. And any files added to an "aligned" archive will not be aligned.


Command Syntax / Usage

To align your apk file (HelloWorld.apk in my case) we can use following comment -

zipalign -f -v 4 HelloWorld.apk HelloWorldOut.apk

To conform that the alignment is done we can use

zipalign -c -v 4 HelloWorldOut.apk

General syntax is

zipalign [-f] [-v] <alignment> infile.apk outfile.apk
zipalign -c -v <alignment> existing.apk

The <alignment> is an integer that defines the byte-alignment boundaries. This must always be 4 (which provides 32-bit alignment) or else it effectively does nothing.

Flags:

    -f : overwrite existing outfile.zip
    -v : verbose output
    -c : confirm the alignment of the given file



Note : In my case if you had see the previous post on exporting the apk from Eclipse by signing it then the apk exported is already aligned. Quoting from documentation "When using Eclipse with the ADT plugin, the Export Wizard will automatically zipalign your .apk after it signs it with your private key". you can easily verify that by running -
zipalign -c -v 4 HelloWorldOut.apk




Not able to find zipalign command?

I could not find zipalign.exe file in sdk/tools. I had to copy the file from sdk\build-tools\android-4.4W\zipalign.exe to sdk\tools. I have not tried it but upgrading your SDK Build-tools to version 20 seems to fix this issue. Refer cannot find zip-align when publishing app.


Understanding why memory alignment is so important

Aligned access is faster because the external bus to memory is not a single byte wide - it is typically 4 or 8 bytes wide (or even wider). This means that the CPU doesn't fetch a single byte at a time - it fetches 4 or 8 bytes starting at the requested address. As a consequence of this, the 2 or 3 least significant bits of the memory address are not actually sent by the CPU - the external memory can only be read or written at addresses that are a multiple of the bus width. If you requested a byte at address "9", the CPU would actually ask the memory for the block of bytes beginning at address 8, and load the second one into your register (discarding the others).

This implies that a misaligned access can require two reads from memory: If you ask for 8 bytes beginning at address 9, the CPU must fetch the 8 bytes beginning at address 8 as well as the 8 bytes beginning at address 16, then mask out the bytes you wanted. On the other hand, if you ask for the 8 bytes beginning at address 8, then only a single fetch is needed. Some CPUs will not even perform such a misaligned load - they will simply raise an exception (or even silently load the wrong data!).

Reference - what is mean by “memory is 8 bytes aligned”?

In general cases (bus size) it is 4 bytes (32 bits). So we use 4 as the value in zipalign command. So when we do zipalign on an apk some padding is added so that each data is 4 bytes aligned. In this case data can be accessed directly by memory map and no redundant data needs to be loaded into the memory thereby saving RAM.

Related Links

Building APK file from Android application in Eclipse

Background

In last post we saw how can we create a simple "Hello World" Androd Application. In this post we will see how can we sign the application with your own private key and export apk.

Exporting APK of your Android Application

  1.  Right click on the project and select Export. In the list options select Android Application.

  2. Next you may get a Project check window in which you will have to choose  your project. "Hello World" project in this case.

  3. Next window that you would get is to choose the keystore and provide it's password. I have already create a keystore and have also explained it an a previous post. Follow it to create your own keystore - Creating a self signed certificate for SSL using java keytool

  4. Now you can choose to use an existing key or create a new one. I had create a key previously for running SSL on my tomcat which is why you may see it in the below screenshot. But lets  create a new key for this android application.

  5. Go ahead add your details to create a new key. Also you will have to provide a password for it. Recommended value for validity years is 35 but you can put your own value.

  6. That should be it. Next screen will ask to to choose location for exporting your APK. Select the location you wish you apk to be exported and click Finish.

  7. And you have your apk signed with your private key whose password only you know.

Related Links

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