duplicate files during packaging of APK

Question

I just started Android programming. I tried to build an application with several 3rd party jars.

When packaging the app, I got an error "duplicate files during packaging of APK". The reason is there are some files with same names in the META-INF directories (the content of the files is not the same - so there need to be different versions).

How does Android packaging work? Does Android just unpack all jars from the libs folder and then put everything in the APK? Is this APK just one big jar?

Answer 1

an apk is like a jar just a zip-container. You can control packaging like this when you use gradle.

packagingOptions {
    exclude 'asm-license.txt'
    exclude 'LICENSE'
    exclude 'NOTICE'
}

The above solves the duplicate files problem for assertj for me