SoLoader: SoLoader is not compatible with Android app bundles

Bumping this issue as we are still seeing this when attempting to use app bundles for a React Native application.

Fatal Exception: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError couldn’t find DSO to load: libhermes.so

RN version 0.62

i tried with react-native 0.61.1 but still issue is there. not sure what to do with this inconsistencies 😦 which file we need to keep this force code ???

Potentially related: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/25536

Looks potentially related: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/25927

Since Android 4.2 (JB-MR2), soloader function is not needed. In Soloader README.md, it said

SoLoader is a native code loader for Android. 
It takes care of unpacking your native libraries and recursively loads dependencies on platforms 
that don't support that out of the box.

But in bionic document, it said https://android.googlesource.com/platform/bionic/+/master/android-changes-for-ndk-developers.md#changes-to-library-dependency-resolution

Until it was fixed in JB-MR2, Android didn‘t include the application library directory on the dynamic linker’s search path.
This meant that apps had to call dlopen or System.loadLibrary on all transitive dependencies 
before loading their main library. 
Worse, until it was fixed in JB-MR2, the dynamic linker's caching code cached failures too, 
so it was necessary to topologically sort your libraries and load them in reverse order.

So, here is simple solution.

1. Use minSdkVersion 18 or higher
2. Add following code on your application.

package com.facebook.soloader;

import android.content.Context;

public class SoLoader {
  public static final int SOLOADER_ENABLE_EXOPACKAGE = (1 << 0);
  public static final int SOLOADER_ALLOW_ASYNC_INIT = (1 << 1);
  public static final int SOLOADER_LOOK_IN_ZIP = (1 << 2);
  public static final int SOLOADER_DISABLE_BACKUP_SOSOURCE = (1 << 3);
  public static final int SOLOADER_SKIP_MERGED_JNI_ONLOAD = (1 << 4);

  public static void init(Context context,  boolean nativeExopackage) {
  }

  public static boolean loadLibrary(String libname) {
      return loadLibrary(libname, 0);
  }

  public static boolean loadLibrary(String libname, int loadFlags) throws UnsatisfiedLinkError {
      System.loadLibrary(libname);
      return true;
  }
}

• It was okay to use yoga
• For react native, need to check that more symbols should be exposed.

1. Exclude soloader from build dependency

The commit that adds app bundle support is c7980fc, which should actually be in 0.6.0 already - so maybe there’s still an issue even with 0.8.0?

The problem we’ve been seeing is not that bundles are completely unsupported, but that SoLoader attempts to handle bundles and sometimes ends up with corrupted .so files.

I think something about the way .so files are extracted to the file system is just not working reliably on all devices. Unless this has been specifically investigated and addressed, I think this bug still exists.

The real test would be to re-enable app bundles and check the crash rates, but I’m not in a position to do that without being extremely confident that the bug has actually been fixed.

It would be great to see a solution that skips the extraction step completely for uncompressed native libraries (https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/reduce-apk-size#reduce-binaries). That would give us a high degree of confidence in the fix.

version 0.8.0 should fix this issue.

I am also facing this issue with React Native 0.60.5, disabling Hermes seems to help too.