Android : Install-time Extraction Of .apk Files?

I'm writing an application and would like to have some files extracted from the .apk during _installation_ time, as the files can be quite large and extracting them from the .apk during the first run results in a noticeable slowdown which I would prefer to avoid.

After lots of experimentation, I have found one way to make this work, but I'm unsure about the "long-term" ramifications of this approach, specifically: will this actually work in android-9 and later?

The approach is to name the files I want extracted at installation time as "lib*.so", and place them into the appropriate lib/ABI folder within the apk file, e.g. the .apk contains:

lib/armeabi/libMyLargeFile.dat.so and at installation time this is (nicely) installed as:

$APPDIR/lib/libMyLargeFile.dat.so

My concern is that 'libMyLargeFile.dat.so' is NOT an ELF shared library. This approach only works because PackageManagerService only checks for files matching the `lib/ABI/lib*.so` pattern (which is followed) and does not check the contents of the extracted file.

This approach works for Android 1.6 through Android 2.2. I'm wondering if this will continue to work in the future, or if I need to investigate an alternate mechanism.