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The NDK is only needed for including native ARM code in Android packages (APK files). The Android kernel and system libraries have always been native code. Th
by mbrubeck 16y ago
The NDK is only needed for including native ARM code in Android packages (APK files).
The Android kernel and system libraries have always been native code. This includes Dalvik itself, and WebKit and V8 (or JavaScriptCore), and many other libraries like SQLite, Speex, BlueZ, BSDiff, and zlib. They are installed directly on the system partition, not in APK files, and this has been true since before the NDK existed.
The "Browser" app is an activity written in Java, but it uses the Android WebView API to embed WebKit, which is written in C++. The Java code handles the browser "chrome" - menus, toolbars, everything except the page content. (This is similar to Firefox which uses the C++ Gecko engine with JavaScript/XUL chrome.)