One of the biggest caveats about developing for the Android platform till now has been the lack of a native programming SDK. With the new Android NDK, you can write code in C / C++ that will run on the mobile's processor directly, instead of running on Androids Dalvik Virtual Machine.

The NDK comes as an add-on for the Android SDK, and is not meant as a substitute development platform. Meaning that you will not be able to code an application for Android entirely in C / C++. However it is meant as a tool to create or port libraries which can be utilized by you main program (written in Java using the SDK). Highly CPU intensive tasks stand most to gain by being written in native code.

A clear visible advantage here is that a large no of libraries which already exist written in C / C++, can now easily be ported to run on Android, and for developers this presents a huge opportunity to utlize ready-made code in this new platform. Since the code generated by this will run directly it will also run faster than code for Dalvik, although they claim that the performance gain will not be significant.

With this new NDK, Android stands to pull in a great no of C / C++ developers to mobile development, by making it easier to have their applications running on yet another platform. The end users can now get better performing applications, and more applications developed faster. With Flash already running on the HTC Hero powered by Android, this is yet another push ahead for Android.

Get more information and download the Android NDK from here.