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Jun. 27, 2009

Mobile application developers can now easily integrate native code into wireless applications and MIDs (mobile Internet devices) written for the Android operating system using Google's new NDK (native development kit).

Officially announced June 25 on the Android developers blog, the new Android 1.5 NDK doesn't actually allow mobile developers to run completely native code on MIDs. Instead, it supports adding native code into applications written to run in Dalvik virtual machine (DVM) instances.

The NDK lets Android developers execute parts of DVM-bound apps using native-code languages such as C and C++.

However, there are some drawbacks to this method. The announcement warns developers that the NDK isn't for everybody. "As a mobile apps developer, you will need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks, which are numerous," reads the blog announcement.

"Your application will be more complicated, have reduced compatibility, have no access to framework APIs, and be harder to debug," it went on to say.

Some mobile apps that have self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don't allocate much memory may still benefit from increased performance and the ability to reuse existing code. Some examples are signal processing, intensive physics simulations and various data processing tasks.

Google's announcement also details some of the pros and cons in their ordering of using the NDK.

The addition of the Android 1.5 NDK to the 'droider's arsenal indicates that the Android team is working to attract more mobile apps developers to the platform - particularly Symbian developers, or possibly iPhone developers who have seen their hard work disappear into the horde of 50,000 apps now clogging the iTunes App Store.

Overall, if you're a mobile apps developer with sufficient experience to battle some obstacles outlined above, the Android team has set up a forum where you can swap notes with other native-code 'droiders'.

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Source: Google.