Android armeabi devices with API level 15+ - android-ndk

I'm developing an app for API level 15+ that has some jni code and i'm wondering if there are devices with armeabi ABI (ARMv5) and API level 15+
Can i include only armeabi-v7a and x86 libraries and skip the old armeabi?

Android itself doesn't support ARM versions below ARMv7 from Android 4.4 (API level 19). Since Android 4.0 (API level 15), it doesn't support ARMv5/ARMv6 by default but can be modified to build for those platforms (see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/android-building/Q_gU1zb6DLc/Bq5QryioQ_kJ), and there are custom builds that run on ARMv6. I'm not entirely sure if there are any official, certified compatible devices that run such a combination (Android 4.0-4.3) though - there should at least not be any such certified devices running Android 4.4, since the compatibility definition document strictly requires ARMv7 from that version.
So in practice you should be pretty safe to skip it, but you might exclude some fringe third party ROMs by doing that.
See https://stackoverflow.com/a/28926267/3115956 for a similar answer to a similar question.

Can i include only armeabi-v7a and x86 libraries and skip the old armeabi?
No, iff app is to be used on old cpu based architecture devices.
And Yes, if we are sure that no customer have older than ARM7 cpu based architecture device.
In our case we purchased the Chilkat licence for one year and they happily supported with ARMEABI .SO files. Hence it is upto the use case. It is affordable for and organisation.
Also wants to share the contact point for Chilkat if anyone wants to contact them for help. Email them at -> support#chilkatsoft.com
Thank you and Happy coding!!!

Related

NDK for the Android 6.0 API?

I'm testing a script to build a shared object from the command line. According to NDK Downloads, the latest download is android-ndk-r10e (I thought this was an old download).
However, when I check for android-23 I see there's nothing available:
$ echo "$ANDROID_NDK_ROOT"
/opt/android-ndk-r10e
$ ls "$ANDROID_NDK_ROOT/platforms"
android-12 android-15 android-18 android-3 android-8
android-13 android-16 android-19 android-4 android-9
android-14 android-17 android-21 android-5
Is the NDK for Android 6.0, which I believe is android-23, not available? Or maybe something else I don't quite understand.
(I'm concerned about the major version bump, and the breaking changes it encompasses, like when the rand function was changed and broke things).
There are no new native APIs in 6.0, so there is no need to have that target available in the NDK - it would be identical to the ones for 5.1 and 5.0.
When building with the NDK, the target platform is picked as the latest one that actually exists prior to the one you've chosen to target (and the earliest one, for ABIs that were introduced later).
Keep in mind that "target API" behaves quite differently between Java and native code. If you build your native code with one target API level, chances are that the code won't run on older versions at all - see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/27338365/3115956 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/27093163/3115956.
So unless you want to try to manually load and use new functionality on some platforms if available, you should just set the target version (APP_PLATFORM in jni/Application.mk) to the lowest version that you want your code to run on, i.e. corresponding to minSdkVersion.
From my understanding, the NDK is in a separate "stream" of development with releases less or more frequent than the Android platform itself. You should be able to develop a NDK app for android-23 devices without any problem, Google probably just did not have time yet to update the NDK release for android-23.
Looking at the revisions, r10e was released a while ago, but the truth is that it is also the latest version as of today.

WebRTC support on BlackBerry 10

Are there WebRTC libraries ported to BlackBerry? If not, is it possible to port Android NDK code to BB10 project?
Thanks in advance!
WebRTC is completely free for both paid and unpaid apps.
Currently, BlackBerry is interested in delivering support for WebRTC and are researching/investigating on the technology. However, no dates or release schedules have been announced at the moment.
Depending on the APIs being used in the Android app. it may or may not be possible to port Android NDK code to BlackBerry10.
Though the Android Runtime would not support WebRTC projects, BlackBerry10 OS is built on QNX, which is a fully compliant POSIX system.
The QNX compiler, QCC, has a GCC-compliant mode to easily port over existing code.

Entity Framework support in MonoTouch and Mono for Android

Now that the upcoming Mono version includes EF4, are the imminent plans to include it in MonoTouch and Mono for Android?
For Android, the chances that we include it are very high, as Android can run the entire CLR. On iOS the situation is more complicated, as there are various limitations imposed by the iOS kernel that prevent some forms of generics code from running.
Additionally, all of the EF work runs on top of Mono 2.11, while both mobile products are based on a much older codebase, so any upgrade will have to wait until both products are rebased on top of the upcoming Mono 2.12, and that wont happen until December or so.

Android 4.0 unpacks the wrong eabi for included library

Here is the situation: I've built a native library for re-distribution in other apps. Because we're using ARMv7 NEON, we ship two versions of the library: One for most devices and a "fallback" limited capability version for ARMv5/ARMv6. So far so good and this has worked well.
However, for some reason a newly created app running on a Nexus S with Android 4.0.3 is picking up the wrong (armeabi rather than armeabi-v7a) version of the library.
If we dig into the device filesystem, we find that /data/app/my_app.apk contains the correct versions of the library. However, when Android extracts it to /data/data/my_app, we find that /data/data/my_app/lib/my_lib.so is the armeabi version. But, strangely, /data/data/my_other_app/lib/my_lib.so is the correct armeabi-v7a version.
So the questions are:
1) WTF??
2) How does Android decide which eabi to extract from the APK?
Yes, this is known bug in ICS - it chooses wrong library.
Read about it here:
http://www.moodstocks.com/2012/03/20/ice-cream-sandwich-why-native-code-support-sucks/
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/android-ndk/N8FLjvM81pg/2rYeClQZcckJ

Monotouch bindings to Obj-c library

I'm trying to bind to an objective-c library with the btouch tool. Should I be binding to a library (lib.a file) built for the iPhone or for the iOS simulator? And what is the difference if any?
Also, does it make a difference if I bind to a debug build vs. release?
Using the iPhone or the Sim version of the .a file really matters when you actually build and run. The sim version of the library is built for the intel x86 architecture and the iOS device version is built for armv6/arvm7 so it is important to link against the version of the static lib that matches what your are targeting. You can make one big library that has both the sim and iOS device .a linked together. If you lookup on Google there will be some walk throughs on how to link the two together.

Resources