I’m working on a Ionic project which is deployed to mobile devices via Cordova. For performance and compatibility, I introduced Crosswalk, which is a library embedding a Chrome into the app.

It’s working great and as expected. There is only one problem: the size is too big. It comes about 20MB for each architecture, so ARM and x86 need 40MB, while my app itself is only 10MB.

Fortunately, with Crosswalk-lite, the library size can be reduced by ~50%. The price is disabled features, and decompression at the first time of boot after installed. On my old Galaxy Nexus, the decompression takes ~20 seconds.

Crosswalk-lite seems in immature state, lacking customizations, including the ability to set the title and content of the prompt during the decompression, which is important to me that I want to comfort the users, using Chinese.

I followed the instruction, and successfully compiled a library with customized decompression prompt. I’m writing down some outdated steps, and missing caveats.

Compilation Steps

  • Get a nice machine. I used a VPS with 8 cores and 16GB memory. It gonna use a lot of resources to compile chromium.
  • Follow steps in Linux Build Instructions — Prerequisites, mainly download depot tools and install dependencies.
  • Follow steps in Build Instructions (Android), checking out latest chromium code. I used --no-history parameter to get a shallow clone, so it’s much smaller.
  • Run build/install-build-deps-android.sh for more dependencies.
  • Clone Crosswalk source as described here, using gclient. Use crosswalk-lite branch in the url (appending @origin/crosswalk-lite).
  • Set XWALK_OS_ANDROID, configure chromium.gyp_env file (setting target_arch=ia32 generates a library with both ARM and x86 support, setting target_arch=arm generates a library with only ARM support).
  • Change anything you need in src/xwalk. In my case, I changed the string of IDS_CROSSWALK_INSTALL_TITLE and IDS_DECOMPRESSION_PROGRESS_MESSAGE in runtime/android/core/strings/xwalk_app_strings.grd.
  • Let the compilation begins! We’ll need ninja -C out/Release xwalk_core_library, and ninja -C out/Release xwalk_core_library_aar xwalk_shared_library_aar. It took 0.5~1 hour in my VPS. (The aar file seems just a zip file, so to combine different architectures, unzip, copy, and zip again should do, according to XWALK-1930).
  • All we need is the generated xwalk_core_library.aar in src/out/Release.

Usage Steps

  • According to Developing with Crosswalk AAR, use mvn install:install-file to install xwalk_core_library.aar into local mvn repository. The version is specified in parameters and will be used later.
  • In config.xml of the Ionic project, update xwalkVersion to the version we just made up and used.
  • In the generated platform/android, edit cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview/xxx-xwalk.gradle, find repositories block, and add mavenLocal(). (The cordova doc is wrong, the url should not be deleted.) It’s like
repositories {
  maven {
    url xwalkMavenRepo
  }
  mavenLocal()
}

and the dependencies block, with the full version info.

dependencies {
  compile 'org.xwalk:xwalk_core_library_canary:(version without parenthese)'
}

  • Build and install the apk.

  • <preference name="loadUrlTimeoutValue" value="60000" /> seems necessary in config.xml, otherwise, the decompression will use up the time and the page won’t load, though it’ll work in next boot.

TODO:

  • Cordova plugin cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview needs work to support customized libraries.
  • There may be code setting timeout for device ready. The first try to load contents may be error-prone. It may be a good idea to refresh somehow after decompression.