Chapter 15. The Native Development Kit (NDK)

The Native Development Kit, or NDK, is an add-on to SDK that helps you integrate native code—code that uses platform-specific features, generally exposed through C or C++ language APIs—within your Android application. The NDK allows your Android application to call some native code and even include some native libraries.

In the Gingerbread release of Android, NDK takes support for native code even further with the introduction of the NativeActivity class. You can now write your entire activity in C or C++. However, NativeActivity is not the subject of this chapter. Here, we’ll look at integrating native C code within your Java Android application.