Before downloading the NDK,you should understand that the NDK will not benefit most apps. As a developer,you need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks. Notably,using native code on Android generally does not result in a noticable performance improvement,but it always increases your app complexity. In general,you should only use the NDK if it is essential to your app—never because you simply prefer to program in C/C++.

Typical good candidates for the NDK are self-contained,cpu-intensive operations that don’t allocate much memory,such as signal processing,physics simulation,and so on. When examining whether or not you should develop in native code,think about your requirements and see if the Android framework APIs provide the functionality that you need.