Uploading a 360 video app to Google Play store?

I’m trying to play a 360 video on the GearVR and deploy my application through google play.

I’ve got the application working perfectly. However, I have the video embedded in the application itself. The 360 video is 300Mb. So, if I package the video within the APK, the APK size is over 300mb. Unfortunately, the google play store only accepts APK’s which are under 100Mb. If I want to upload my APK to the store, I have to store the 300Mb video somewhere outside of the APK. The common thing to do is put the video into an OBB file. However, I don’t know how or where to upload the OBB file and reference it through the APK. Does anyone have any experience with this?

An alternative is to upload the video to a server on the web and pull the video through a stream. Does anyone have experience streaming 360 videos directly from a URL? I’ve seen other VR apps do it and the latency seems to be pretty low.

Streaming is possible by simply playing from a URL however of course you can simply use an OBB file! simply make sure: “Package game data inside apk” is unchecked and then a OBB file is created!

Also note I think you got something mixed up as you labelled this post as gearvr however gearvr uses the Oculus platform which is totally different from google play! Google play does not support gearvr has a 100meg apk limit and OBB support while Oculus supports gearvr and has no apk limits (so you need to package the full 300meg inside the apk for oculus). It means you need to make 2 builds - one for Oculus and gearvr and one for Google Play and cardboard/daydream.

The goal is to display the app icon outside of the oculus store client, so the idea was to try to package and distribute through the google play store. When people download and install the app, it is displayed in their apps list instead of being hidden behind the store client (similar to what you’d get if you deploy a debug build to the android phone). The problem is, I can’t figure out where to upload the OBB file on the google play store, and I also don’t know how to make sure that someone downloading and running the APK also downloads the OBB.

Ah that is not allowed by Oculus. See the very last sentence here: https://developer.oculus.com/distribute/latest/concepts/publish-mobile-manifest/