Chapter 2. Starting a Native Android Project

A man with the most powerful tools in hand is unarmed without the knowledge of their usage. Make, GCC, Ant, Bash, Eclipse…—any new Android programmer needs to deal with this technological ecosystem. Luckily, some of these names may already sound familiar. Indeed, Android is based on many open source components, laid together by the Android Development Kits and their specific tool-set: ADB, AAPT, AM, NDK-Build, NDK-GDB... Mastering them will give us the power to create, build, deploy and debug our own Android applications.

Before diving deeper into native code in the next chapter, let's discover these tools by starting a new concrete Android project that includes native C/C++ code. Despite Android Studio being the new official Android IDE, its lack of support for native code encourages us to focus mainly on Eclipse.

Therefore, in this chapter, we are going to:

• Build an official sample application and deploy it on an...