Android Developers Blog

By Dan Albert, Software Engineer One thing that NDK users struggle with is managing native dependencies: Library authors need to maintain support for both ndk-build and CMake (and hope that their users are using one of those two options and not something else). Libraries don’t always distribute prebuilt binaries for Android, so users must either build the library themselves or rely on (potentially untrustworthy) prebuilt binaries found elsewhere on the web. Android-specific build scripts are often out of date and no longer work. Libraries are sometimes built by a build system that Android doesn’t support. Libraries may not build on the user’s machine. For example, Unix shell scripts won’t run on Windows. Libraries often depend on other libraries, leaving users to chase them down and start the process again. With version 4.0 of the Android Gradle Plugin, we’ve addressed these issues by adding support for distributing and exposing native libraries through the same mechanism that you do f...

Posted by Dan Galpin , Developer Advocate With over 2.5 billion monthly active devices, the Android Platform gives incredible reach for game developers. Taking advantage of that opportunity can be a challenge, particularly if your game really tries to push the limits of what mobile can do. We've spent years working with game developers to try to both capture and address the biggest issues, and we're just beginning to see the fruits of that effort with the launch of the Android Game SDK. The Android Game SDK is a set of libraries that you can use to enhance your Android game. The first library we are launching in the Android Game SDK helps developers with frame pacing, the synchronization of a game's rendering loop with the OS display subsystem and underlying display hardware. Android's display subsystem is designed to avoid tearing that occurs when the display hardware switches to a new frame in the middle of an update. To this end, it buffers past frames, detects late ...

Posted by Dan Albert, Android NDK Tech Lead Android NDK r21 is now in beta! It’s been a longer than usual development cycle (four months since NDK r20), so there’s quite a lot to discuss for this release. We have the usual toolchain updates, improved defaults for better security and performance, and are making changes to our release process to better accommodate users that need stability without hindering those that want new features. New Minimum System Requirements This release comes with new minimum system requirements. Following Android Studio and the SDK , 32-bit Windows is no longer supported. While this change will not affect most developers, this change does have an impact if you use 32-bit versions of Microsoft® Windows®. Linux users must have glibc 2.17 or newer. Release Cycle Changes and LTS One release a year will be our Long Term Support (LTS) release for users that want stability more than they need new features. The release will undergo a longer beta cycle before being re...