So, when an app is installed, the original APK file and the extracted libraries are stored on device, which takes quite a lot of extra space for the user. If this is set to false , the libraries are not extracted, but the libraries must be stored uncompressed and aligned to the page boundary inside the APK (using zipalign ). If we have a split APK, then the native libraries are stored in a separate APK, otherwise everything will be in one APK (base.apk).