[pcwalton]

> What I don't like though, is their abysmal NDK support (notably compared to iOS)

Yeah, this is my biggest gripe. The vast majority of popular apps in the Play Store are games, which all use the NDK. Yet Google refuses to give the NDK more resources.

[WorldMaker]

Isn't that Google's intent that the NDK be hard to use? They still act like they may pull the rug at any time and switch kernels or hardware architectures on a whim, so it always seems like Google acts as though any NDK usage is a "bug" to them.

[pcwalton]

There's aspiration, and there's reality. The reality is that virtually all games, which are most of the Play Store, depend on native code. Without those games, Android would be much less attractive of a platform. Even if Google wanted to break them, they realistically can't.

[WorldMaker]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone accuse Google of being realistic. They certainly don't have a problem breaking NDK compatibility at whim, hence some the conversation above and in other threads. It doesn't feel from the outside that Google cares that much about how attractive Android is as a platform to games (or much else, for that matter), where it gets in the way of whatever the aspirations du jour are. (Is this one of the months of the arcane cycle as foretold by the elders that Chrome OS is still dominant over the other signs or is it that the Fuchsia kernel that waxes in the west again?)