Creating, compiling, building, packaging, and deploying an application project are not the most exciting tasks, but they cannot be avoided. Mastering them will allow you to be productive and focused on the real objective: producing code.
In summary, we built our first sample application using command-line tools and deploying it on an Android device. We also created our first native Android project using Eclipse and interfaced Java with C/C++ using Java Native Interfaces. We debugged a native Android application with NDK-GDB and analyzed a native crash dump to find its origin in the source code. Finally, we created a similar project using Android Studio and built it with Gradle.
This first experiment with the Android NDK gives you a good overview of the way native development works. In the next chapter, we are going to focus on the code and dive more deeply into the JNI protocol.