Android App Bundle Version code suddenly very high

Question

I just made a new Android bundle for my React Native app. I manually updated the version code from 90 to 91 in android/app/build.gradle, but now that I am trying to upload to Play Store, the version code is 3145819 (I expected to see 91)

build.gradle:

 defaultConfig {
        applicationId "com.myapp"
        minSdkVersion rootProject.ext.minSdkVersion
        targetSdkVersion rootProject.ext.targetSdkVersion
        versionCode 91
        versionName "4.1.0"
        multiDexEnabled true
        missingDimensionStrategy "RNN.reactNativeVersion", "reactNative57_5"
        resValue "string", "build_config_package", "com.myapp"
    }

I use this command to bundle:

./gradlew bundleProdRelease --console plain

Not sure why this is happening, and I definitely prefer a smaller version code (easier for users to read when reporting bugs).

Any idea what's going on here and how to fix it?

Answer 1

Ohhh ok I finally figured it out! No, I haven't been desperately looking for an answer for the past two years... I just somehow stumbled upon it now.

So, in android/app/build.gradle, there is a script that generates the bundle version code. It's calculated from the version code and the target architecture version code. For example in the RN 0.64x template:

def versionCodes = ["armeabi-v7a": 1, "x86": 2, "arm64-v8a": 3, "x86_64": 4]
def abi = output.getFilter(OutputFile.ABI)

if (abi != null) {
  output.versionCodeOverride = defaultConfig.versionCode * 1000 + versionCodes.get(abi)
}

For me, arm64-v8a always seems to get used as the default when generating the version code, so I get outputs like:

versionCode 1 => 1003
versionCode 12 => 12003
versionCode 105 => 105003
you get the idea...

The calculation used to involve a much more mysterious number (1048576 🔮🧙‍♂️, see in the RN 0.59x template), which seemed arbitrary and made it quite tricky to understand how this bundle version code was generated.

Now it makes much more sense!