NDK Programmer's Guide
Prebuilt Libraries

Android NDK r5 introduced support for prebuilt libraries (shared and static), i.e. the ability to include and use, in your applications, prebuilt version of libraries.

This feature can be useful for two things:

  1. You want to distribute your own libraries to third-party NDK developers without distributing your sources.
  2. You want to use a prebuilt version of your own libraries to speed up your build.

This document explains how this support works.

Declaring a prebuilt library module

Each prebuilt library must be declared as a single independent module to the build system. Here is a trivial example where we assume that the file "libfoo.so" is located in the same directory than the Android.mk below:

    LOCAL_PATH := $(call my-dir)

    include $(CLEAR_VARS)
    LOCAL_MODULE := foo-prebuilt
    LOCAL_SRC_FILES := libfoo.so
    include $(PREBUILT_SHARED_LIBRARY)

Notice that, to declare such a module, you really only need the following:

  1. Give the module a name (here 'foo-prebuilt'). This does not need to correspond to the name of the prebuilt library itself.
  2. Assign to LOCAL_SRC_FILES the path to the prebuilt library you are providing. As usual, the path is relative to your LOCAL_PATH.

    IMPORTANT: You must ensure that the prebuilt library corresponds to the target ABI you are using. More on this later.

  3. Include PREBUILT_SHARED_LIBRARY, instead of BUILD_SHARED_LIBRARY, if you are providing a shared, library. For static ones, use PREBUILT_STATIC_LIBRARY.

A prebuilt module does not build anything. However, a copy of your prebuilt shared library will be copied into $PROJECT/obj/local, and another will be copied and stripped into $PROJECT/libs/<abi>.

Referencing the prebuilt library in other modules

Simply list your prebuilt module's name in the LOCAL_STATIC_LIBRARIES or LOCAL_SHARED_LIBRARIES declaration in the Android.mk of any module that depends on them.

For example, a naive example of a module using libfoo.so would be:

    include $(CLEAR_VARS)
    LOCAL_MODULE := foo-user
    LOCAL_SRC_FILES := foo-user.c
    LOCAL_SHARED_LIBRARIES := foo-prebuilt
    include $(BUILD_SHARED_LIBRARY)

Exporting headers for prebuilt libraries

The example above was called 'naive' because, in practice, the code in foo-user.c is going to depend on specific declarations that are normally found in a header file distributed with the prebuilt library (e.g. "foo.h").

In other words, foo-user.c is going to have a line like:

  #include <foo.h>

And you need to provide the header and its include path to the compiler when building the foo-user module.

A simple way to deal with that is to use exports in the prebuilt module definition. For example, assuming that a file "foo.h" is located under the 'include' directory relative to the prebuilt module, we can write:

    include $(CLEAR_VARS)
    LOCAL_MODULE := foo-prebuilt
    LOCAL_SRC_FILES := libfoo.so
    LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES := $(LOCAL_PATH)/include
    include $(PREBUILT_SHARED_LIBRARY)

The LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES definition here ensures that any module that depends on the prebuilt one will have its LOCAL_C_INCLUDES automatically prepended with the path to the prebuilt's include directory, and will thus be able to find headers inside that.

Debugging prebuilt binaries

We recommend you to provide prebuilt shared libraries that contain debug symbols. The version that is installed into $PROJECT/libs/<abi>/ is always stripped by the NDK build system, but the debug version will be used for debugging purposes with ndk-gdb.

ABI Selection of prebuilt binaries

As said previously, it is crucial to provide a prebuilt shared library that is compatible with the targeted ABI during the build. To do that, check for the value of TARGET_ARCH_ABI, its value will be:

  armeabi     => when targeting ARMv5TE or higher CPUs
  armeabi-v7a => when targeting ARMv7 or higher CPUs
  x86         => when targeting x86 CPUs
  mips        => when targeting MIPS CPUs

Note that armeabi-v7a systems can run armeabi binaries just fine.

Here's an example where we provide two versions of a prebuilt library and select which one to copy based on the target ABI:

    include $(CLEAR_VARS)
    LOCAL_MODULE := foo-prebuilt
    LOCAL_SRC_FILES := $(TARGET_ARCH_ABI)/libfoo.so
    LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES := $(LOCAL_PATH)/include
    include $(PREBUILT_SHARED_LIBRARY)

Here. we assume that the prebuilt libraries to copy are under the following directory hierarchy:

    Android.mk            --> the file above
    armeabi/libfoo.so     --> the armeabi prebuilt shared library
    armeabi-v7a/libfoo.so --> the armeabi-v7a prebuilt shared library
    include/foo.h         --> the exported header file

NOTE: Remember that you don't need to provide an armeabi-v7a prebuilt library, since an armeabi one can easily run on the corresponding devices.