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Android ABI support

This SDK ships arm64-v8a only.

Its OpenCV is a custom build compiled with BUILD_opencv_stitching=ON (stock OpenCV drops the stitching module — see Bring your own OpenCV), and that build exists for arm64-v8a alone. armeabi-v7a, x86 and x86_64 are not in the AAR.

For shipping apps this is a non-issue: every Android device Google has allowed to launch with Play Services since 2021 is arm64, and 32-bit-only devices can't run 64-bit-only apps regardless. Where it does bite is development, and specifically emulators.

Emulators​

Host machineRecommended AVD imageWorks?
Apple Silicon Macarm64-v8a system image (the default offered)✅
Intel Mac / Windows / Linuxx86_64 system image❌
AnyPhysical arm64 device over USB✅

On Apple Silicon, Android Studio offers arm64-v8a images by default, so most Mac developers never notice. On an Intel host there is no arm64 emulator worth using — develop against a physical device.

What it looks like when the ABI is wrong​

Since v0.24.4 the app still launches, panorama features are disabled, and logcat carries one loud message:

E RNImageStitcher: react-native-image-stitcher: native library
  'image_stitcher' could not be loaded. Panorama capture, keyframe
  gating and stitching are unavailable; the rest of the app is
  unaffected.
    Device ABIs: x86_64, arm64-v8a
    This SDK ships arm64-v8a ONLY …

Filter for it with:

adb logcat -s RNImageStitcher

Before v0.24.4 the same situation was far worse: seven classes called System.loadLibrary from a static initialiser, and four of those are constructed eagerly by the SDK's ReactPackage during bridge startup. A throwing static initialiser becomes an ExceptionInInitializerError that propagates out of createNativeModules(), so the entire host app failed to launch — on every screen, not just the camera — with a stack trace that named neither ABIs nor OpenCV. If you are debugging an unexplained startup crash on an older version, upgrade first; the error message will tell you what it actually is.

Check what your build produced​

# ABIs present in an APK
unzip -l app-debug.apk | grep 'lib/'

# ABIs the connected device supports
adb shell getprop ro.product.cpu.abilist

If lib/ has no arm64-v8a/libimage_stitcher.so, the native build was filtered out — check your app module's ndk { abiFilters … } and any splits { abi { … } } block.

Adding another ABI​

You need an OpenCV Android SDK for that ABI, built with BUILD_opencv_stitching=ON, and then to point this SDK at it:

# android/gradle.properties
rnisHostOpenCVSdkDir=/abs/path/to/your/OpenCV-android-sdk/sdk

See Bring your own OpenCV for the full flow, and scripts/build-opencv-android.sh for the reference build (it drives OpenCV's own CMake with the flags this SDK needs, including the 16 KB page-size alignment Android 15 requires).

Note that the SDK's own android/build.gradle also pins abiFilters 'arm64-v8a'; a build with more ABIs needs that widened to match what your OpenCV provides.

iOS, for contrast​

The iOS framework ships both the device (arm64) and simulator (arm64) slices as of v0.24.4, so host apps build and run in the iOS Simulator normally on Apple Silicon. The x86_64 simulator slice (Intel Macs) is not built — OpenCV's builder cannot configure it on an arm64 machine, and an Intel Mac cannot run an arm64 iOS simulator anyway. (v0.7.1–v0.24.3 stripped the simulator slice to save ~17 MB, which broke simulator builds of the entire host app with building for iOS Simulator, but linking in object file built for iOS. That trade has been reversed.)

See also​