Creating a native activity with Android NDK

In the following section, we are going to study how an application can be done entirely using native C code, without any Java code being required at all. Please note that this is done more for study purposes, as there are not many practical cases where developing a purely native application will be useful. However, it will serve as a good example of interaction between the different layers and the Android operational system.

Since we are not using Java code, we need to specify in the AndroidManifest.xml file that our project will contain no Java code. This is done using the following lines:

<application android:label="@string/app_name"
android:hasCode="false">

Applications using only native code are first supported from the API level 9 onwards. At the time of writing this book, this should not be a problem, since the versions comprising under API Level 9 ranked under 0.1% of the total. However, due to the nature of the NDK, you might be using...