Android builds won't run on API 19 or below. Always Crashes! 4.17.1

Since Unreal Engine 4.16 that any of my games can’t run under devices with API 19 or below. The same story in 4.17.

I was expecting in this new engine version to get best android performance, among other things (since my focus is mobile/android development), instead, I had to unsupport all android devices from API 19 and below since every time I package my projects to this devices it always crashes no matter what I do. Every Project I Build for API 21 and up works with no problems!


Steps I’m taking:

1 - Made an APK to support API 15 minimum and target 19 to use ETC1 textures. (NDK 19 and SDK = matchndk)

2 - Made an APK to support API 21 minimum and target 24 to use ETC2 textures and ES2 and ES3.1 and Vulkan (NDK 21 and SDK “latest”)


Problem - The APK based on 15/19 does not work and crashes on it’s respective devices.
Only the APK 21/24 is working correctly with no problems at all!

This happens with all my projects and even with the template projects from UE4.


Screenshots and Logcat:

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My android launches crash with no splash screen in this exact situation too.
It seems to have something to do with the following monitor log:

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Cannot load library: link_image[1891]: 164 could not load needed library ‘libOVRPlugin.so’ for ‘libUE4.so’ (find_library[1201]: 164 ‘libOVRPlugin.so’ failed to load previously)

However, I removed all the Oculus VR plugins so I don’t know how to get this to stop being a required library. There’s nothing left to remove!

This was the only reason why I again switched back to 4.15,
This bug r whatever this is costed me a 2 month of a headache.
This seems to be a problem with both 4.16 and 4.17 version of engines.
I have tried to run my app on both versions 4.16 and 4.17 but my problem have met only a horrible death. My program shows a UE4 splash screen and after few seconds it crashes.
They should also add an option of priority Answer Feed or something similar in answerhub.
Because after searching on google I have found out that many people seem to be having the same problem.But we have no proper solution for this :frowning:

Yea, I’m on the same boat as you, I’m working on big a project by myself I can’t properly test my game on older devices because of this. If only Epic could help with this but I don’t think they even know what is going on. I found until now that UE 4.17 is very buggy in some areas :/. Yesterday I was shipping my game to my daily device and suddenly there was 200k shaders to compile .-. that was insane xD

Is someone going to help us regarding this issue??

I hope so. I may have to settle for never building an Android game with Unreal otherwise. I’ve tried quite a few random combinations of settings in Project settings for Android and Android SDK, and installed SDK level 16 to try to make it work with my Samsung Galaxy S2 (Jelly Bean). I’m not installing Visual Studio 2017 over the top of 2013 to see if that will make it work, since someone told me that adding an empty C++ project to my Unreal 4.17.2 project will make it stop crashing on Android app launch, but doing this causes a lot of compile errors and says I need VS 2015. I don’t know, maybe I need all three of 2013, 2015, and 2017?

If your project is Blueprints only, your C++ errors maybe are from the “Nativized Assets”. I dont have problems with that and do have VS2017 only installed. But I dont think this is the main cause to our true problem here :confused:

OK I will look into my VS installs too, and try including a C++ asset to fix it.

SO have you tried 4.18 , Have they solved the problem?

Guys, I’ve been trying 4.18 and so far, Api 15/19 is working perfectly as intended. So I’m closing this thread for now. You should really try the new engine version. Have a great day everyone :wink:

PS: If you build for API 15/19 it will throw an error with OVRPlugin. Simply disable the OculusVR plugin and the game will package with no problems. At least this happened with me.

Thanks PlatinumBlade, I’ll try 4.18.

However, I should mention for others’ benefit that in 4.17, disabling OculusVR plugin did NOT solve the problem in my case (I even disabled all plugins with “virtual”, “reality”, “oculus”, or “VR” in the name (actually I disabled every plugin but 3, which were definitely not VR-related).