Native development on Android

Developers can now download the Android Native Development Kit from the Android developer site.

The NDK allows developers to implement parts of applications using native-code languages such as C and C++. This can provide benefits to certain kinds of applications.

The NDK provides:

• a set of tools and build files used to generate native code libraries from C and C++ sources


• a way to embed the corresponding native libraries into application packages files (.apks) that can be deployed on Android devices


• a set of native system headers and libraries that will be supported in all future releases of the Android platform, starting from Android 1.5 documentation, samples and tutorials

The Android 1.5 NDK, Release 1 supports the ARMv5TE machine instruction set and provides stable headers for:

• libc, the standard C library


• libm, the standard math library


• the JNI interface


• libz, the common ZLib compression library


• liblog, used to send logcat messages to the kernel