Visual Studio Archive Manager creates APK with compressed resources.arsc, causing installation failure on Android 16 (API 36)

[pfankhauser57]

Android framework version

net10.0-android

Affected platform version

Visual Studio 2026 18.7.2, .NET 10 MAUI, Target Framework: net10.0-android, Android device: Android 16 (API 36)

Description

When creating an Android APK using the Visual Studio Archive Manager ("Publish" → "Archive Manager" → "Distribute"), the resulting APK cannot be installed on an Android 16 device.

The installation fails with:

adb.exe: failed to install app.apk:
Failure [-124: Failed parse during installPackageLI:
Targeting R+ (version 30 and above) requires the resources.arsc
of installed APKs to be stored uncompressed and aligned on a
4-byte boundary]

The same project builds and installs successfully when using a normal Release build with MSBuild signing (AndroidKeyStore=true).

Steps to Reproduce

1. Build MAUI-App with Release/Android-LocalDevice
2. Right-Click on MAUI-Project/Publish -> Archive-Manager starts and builds archive
3. Archive-Manager Distribute apk-File to published folder
4. Download apk-File to Android device
5. Install apk-File -> Error "Not installed..."

Did you find any workaround?

1. Build MAUI-App with Release/Android-LocalDevice
2. Put apk-File from bin/Release/net10-android to published folder.
3. Download apk-File to Android device
4. Install apk-File -> OK, run as expected

Relevant log output

[pfankhauser57]

Additional Information:
Investigation

Both APKs were compared.

Both are:

signed with the same certificate
signed using APK Signature Scheme v3
correctly zipaligned (zipalign -c -v 4 reports "Verification successful")

However, there is one important difference:

APK produced by Archive Manager
resources.arsc
Compression method: DEFLATE (method 8)

APK produced by normal MSBuild Release build
resources.arsc
Compression method: STORED (method 0)

Android 16 rejects the Archive Manager APK but accepts the MSBuild APK.

This suggests that the Archive Manager (or the Distribute step) repackages the APK and compresses resources.arsc, violating Android's packaging requirements.

Expected behaviour
The APK produced by Archive Manager should store resources.arsc uncompressed (ZIP method 0), identical to the APK produced by a normal MSBuild Release build.

Additional information
The issue is reproducible with the same project, same keystore, same signing certificate and same build configuration.

Only the packaging process differs.