Using the NDK

The Android framework provides two ways to use native code:

• Write your application using the Android framework and use JNI to access the APIs provided by the Android NDK. This technique allows you to take advantage of the convenience of the Android framework, but still allows you to write native code when necessary. If you use this approach, your application must target specific, minimum Android platform levels, see Android platform compatibility for more information.

• Write a native activity, which allows you to implement the lifecycle callbacks in native code. The Android SDK provides the NativeActivity class, which is a convenience class that notifies your native code of any activity lifecycle callbacks (onCreate(), onPause(), onResume(), etc). You can implement the callbacks in your native code to handle these events when they occur. Applications that use native activities must be run on Android 2.3 (API Level 9) or later.

  You cannot access features such as Services and Content Providers natively, so if you want to use them or any other framework API, you can still write JNI code to do so.