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Android NDK Could Help Usher in More Useful Applications

Google's announcement last week of its Native Development Kit for Android could be a significant step in ushering in important applications. The Android 1.5 Native Development Kit (NDK) lets developers implement parts of applications using native languages such as C and C++. Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine, but the new NDK will allow developers to call native code in such a way that they can create high-performance applications running directly on Android's Linux base.

David Turner's post on the Android Developers blog provides some detail on when the NDK will and won't make sense for developers:

"Keep in mind that using the NDK will not be relevant for all Android applications. As a developer, you will need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks, which are numerous! Your application will be more complicated, have reduced compatibility, have no access to framework APIs, and be harder to debug. That said, some applications 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 some kinds of data processing."

As CNet reports, Mozilla is already looking at the NDK, to see whether it will make sense to bring its Fennec mobile browser to Android. Meanwhile, the Android Market has over 3,000 applications for the operating system, and growing quickly. In the third quarter of this year, Acer will deliver Android netbooks, and other hardware makers are looking into the same prospect. It's good to see Google doing everything it can to usher in the maximum number of useful applications for Android, because they are what can bring the platform true success.

• Android
• google
• NDK

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