Android NDK

The Android Native Development Kit (NDK) is a toolset provided by Google that enables developers to implement portions of Android applications in native C and C++ code, compiling them into native libraries for improved performance in compute-intensive tasks. It integrates with the Android SDK,…

Key facts

First appeared: 2009
Category: technology
Problem solved: Enables high-performance native code execution in Android apps for tasks like game engines, signal processing, and physics simulations that Java/Kotlin alone cannot handle efficiently due to JVM overhead and garbage collection pauses, bridging managed Java code with unmanaged native libraries via JNI.[4][5]
Platforms: Android (ARM, ARM64, x86, x86_64)

Related technologies

CMake
JNI
LLVM
Gradle
Clang
Android SDK

Notable users

Epic Games (Unreal Engine)
Google
Unity Technologies
Supercell
Electronic Arts
Niantic (Pokemon GO)