Preface

Since its first release in 2008, Android has become the largest mobile platform in the world. The total number of apps in Google Play is expected to reach 1,000,000 in mid 2013. Most of the Android apps are written in Java with Android Software Development Kit (SDK). Many developers only write Android code in Java even though they are experienced with C/C++, without realizing what a powerful tool they are giving up.

Android Native Development Kit (NDK) was released in 2009 to help developers write and port native code. It offers a set of cross-compiling tools and a few libraries. Programming in NDK offers two main advantages. Firstly, you can optimize your apps in native code and boost performance. Secondly, you can reuse a large number of existing C/C++ code. Android Native Development Kit is a practical guide to help you write Android native code with NDK. We will start with the basics such as Java Native Interface (JNI), and build and debug a native app (chapter 1 to 3). We will then explore various libraries provided by NDK, including OpenGL ES, Native Application API, OpenSL ES, OpenMAX AL, and so on (Chapters 4 to 7). After that, we will discuss porting existing applications and libraries to Android with NDK (Chapters 8 and 9). Finally, we will demonstrate how to write multimedia apps and games with NDK (Bonus chapters 1 and 2).