What Android development kit is commonly abbreviated NDK?

The Android development kit commonly abbreviated NDK is the Native Development Kit.

Google’s Android Native Development Kit lets developers compile C and C++ code into native libraries for Android’s processor architectures, including ARM and x86 variants. Those libraries can be called from Kotlin or Java code, commonly through Android’s Java Native Interface mechanisms, when an app needs native performance or access to an existing C/C++ codebase.

The NDK is useful for game engines, media processing, computationally intensive workloads, and platform libraries. It is not a replacement for the Android SDK: the SDK supplies the broad Java/Kotlin-facing Android APIs and ordinary development tools, while the NDK adds native-code tooling. Android Studio and Gradle can integrate NDK projects using CMake or the NDK’s ndk-build system.

The word “native” can cause confusion. NDK code still runs within Android’s application and security model; it does not automatically grant unrestricted access to the device. Modern NDK toolchains use Clang, while GCC support was removed from the NDK in 2018.