[corresation]

The load time and memory consumption of a minimalist NativeActivity is so minuscule that it isn't worth discussion. Your argument beyond there seems to be of the good investment after bad variety -- that if you've made a marginal bad investment, you'd better keep making it just because. That is not good advice in any endeavor.

No one in this thread "ignore the downsides", and your point seems actually very undeveloped: After you've paid that unavoidable, very small initial price (that of course a fully managed app pays as well), you then have 100% minimal native app, using that legacy or cross platform code at full, 100% native speed, with no GC taxes, etc. There is no magical overhead just because you originally started with a native activity.

This is certainly not to say that native is the way to go, because if you're going to make heavy use of the Android API outside of the pure native elements like OpenGL, you're going to just cause yourself a lot of hassle, but most of the anti-native argument seems to derive from nothing at all.

And the ARMv7/v5/MIPS/x86 thing is just strange. Yes, it might be a consideration in some cases (although if it matters 9 times out of 10 you can set a flag and there you go), it is quite a departure from the claims about C++.