It is a common misconception to think that software development is all about writing code, but in reality, that is not where engineers invest most of their time. Instead, most of the effort is put in designing the application and understanding how it behaves once it is deployed.

As applications grow larger and more complex, it is critical to establish a process around how bug fixing can be organised. For Android apps, there are multiple tools that will support teams to collect and analyse crashes and other debugging information.

Similarly to applications that include JVM code (Java/Kotlin) shrinked with tools like Proguard, if the application includes native code (usually C or C++), it might be trickier to get actionable information from stack-traces/tombstones.

Debug symbols

When a native binary is compiled into a shared object (.so), it might include debug symbols, which represent additional information on top of the symbol table of the program. In other words, they include information such as function and variable names, and many other bits related to the original source code.

Shameless plug: Here, I cover how native libraries get linked and loaded in a program to be run on Android

All this extra data can take up a lot of space (sometimes multiple times the size of the actual object code!), and especially for Android, that might inflate the final APK size in a considerable amount, since devices of different CPU architectures also require matching shared object files. For that reason, build tools (such as Gradle) decide for removing the extra debug symbol table, in a process called stripping (read more about strip ).

We can use tools like nm to display the symbol tables of binaries. For example, when I run it over stripped and symbolicated builds of the same library, the output is:

$ nm flipper-stripped/obj/armeabi-v7a/libflipper_stripped.so

>

$ nm flipper-stripped/obj/armeabi-v7a/libflipper_stripped.so | wc -l

> 0

-----------------------------------------------------

$ nm flipper-symbolicated/obj/armeabi-v7a/libflipper_symbolicated.so

> ...

> 002b2540 W _ZNK11M3UPlaylist8toStringEv

> 00251abc W _ZNK12JniException4whatEv

> 002aa5ec W _ZNK12PropertySets3HLScvN4Json5ValueEEv

> 002ab008 W _ZNK12PropertySets4HTTPcvN4Json5ValueEEv

> 00336324 T _ZNK13SQLiteBackend15getRowStatementEv

> 0033766c W _ZNK13SQLiteBackend16hasBuiltInCryptoEv

> ...

$ nm flipper-symbolicated/obj/armeabi-v7a/libflipper_symbolicated.so | wc -l

> 407230

Not surprisingly, when building an AAR that contains each of these builds, the disk space usage difference is noticeable:

$ ls -lh

> juliozynger 26M Apr 21 flipper-stripped.aar

> juliozynger 113M Apr 21 flipper-symbolicated.aar

As you can see above, while stripping binaries is a great idea for saving space, it will prove challenging when an engineer needs to debug an application. So, similarly to how Proguard mapping files are exposed during the build process, native debug symbols can also be stored separately from the release binary and later used to symbolise it with tools like ndk-stack or addr2line.

Usually, that means the release binaries are stored in the jni subdirectory and the symbolicated binaries in the obj subdirectory. Some third-party crash-reporting SDKs, like Firebase Crashlytics, BugSnag, etc. take advantage of that standard and provide ways to upload the debug symbols so that an engineer can get digestible information directly from their web dashboards.

If you build your own native libraries, make sure to output the binaries following the directory arrangement (jni→obj) to benefit from the automatic upload. If you have a more complex setup for building your custom library (for example, stripping symbols in a later stage) and use Gradle, you can also disable stripping of symbols by adding the following to your library’s AAR generation script:

apply plugin: 'com.android.library' android {

...

packagingOptions {

// specify the path to your object binaries, or generally:

doNotStrip '**.so'

}

...

}

Here you can find a simplified version of the script we use at SoundCloud to make sure we store our symbolised and stripped binaries in the correct directories.