accessing Android native method from different project - android-studio

Question

I am working on an Android application that will call a .so file created by a different Android NDK application.
I have created the following folder structure in my project and copied over the .so files as seen below:
|--app:
|--|--src:
|--|--|--main
|--|--|--|--jniLibs
|--|--|--|--|--armeabi
|--|--|--|--|--|--libmylib.so
|--|--|--|--|--x86
|--|--|--|--|--|--libmylib.so
I call this library through my application via the following code:
static {
System.loadLibrary("mylib");
}
I then call the method from this shared object via the following code:
String str = stringFromJNI();
This does not work as the program looks for mangled function name as follows:
com.example.androidlibcall.MainActivity.stringFromJNI() where my .so function will be using a different package name and hence a different function name is generated.
I am not really sure what I need to do to call the functions from the external library, I assume I can create my own library and utilize dlopen() to load the external library and make calls to it, but was wondering if there are the other methods to achieve this or not.
My ultimate goal is to be able to create applications that can call pre-existing libraries that are on the mobile device, but since I am new to NDK/Android I am not sure what is the best method for this and have not found good examples to work with.
A lot of the pre-existing similar questions seem to be dealing with older versions of Android Studio that don't seem applicable anymore.
I am using the latest version of Android Studio (3.1.2) with Gradle 4.4 on Windows 7 machine.
Please advise.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Generally speaking, it's not a good idea to have native methods in application's MainActivity, but this should not worry us now that we are forging a workaround.
Assume that your new project has com.example.other.MainActivity.java, and you want to call the native method com.example.androidlibcall.MainActivity.stringFromJNI() from com.example.other.MainActivity.onCreate(). To do this, create a new Java class in your other app:
package com.example.androidlibcall;
public class MainActivity {
public static native String stringFromJNI();
}
and in your existing MainActivity class,
package com.example.other;
import static com.example.androidlibcall.MainActivity.stringFromJNI;
class MainActivity {
static {
System.loadLibrary("mylib");
}
}
public class MainActivity extends Activity {
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
…
String qq = stringFromJNI();
…
}
}
You see that com/example/androidlibcall/MainActivity.java contains no logic, no data, no code. It is only a wrapper that lets us easily use libmylib.so without rebuilding it.