As someone that works on a native-only app (using Qt's bindings), it has bugged me significantly that Android apk's absolutely cannot handle versioned libraries

As someone that works on a native-only app (using Qt's bindings), it has bugged me significantly that Android apk's absolutely cannot handle versioned libraries nor files without the .so prefix. For instance, bundling the "gdbserver" file that comes with Google's NDK into the armeabi folder to have gradled up and deploy in a debug version of an apk will not pack up "gdbserver". And if you have libtinyxml2.so with the SOVERSION as 3.0? Good luck getting that bundled up into your apk! Recompile without versioning! Or manually adb push it every time you reinstall your application. [0] OK sure you can bundle that up into your apk by skipping gradle and manually adding and zipaligning it. But then adb will not unpack it onto the phone. So you are stuck back at square one. I won't even get into the modifications I've made to my NDK python script with launching gdb. Suffice to say using gdb to debug nontrivial native android applications is full of rough edges. [0] https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=98308 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=98308