Loading 3rd party shared libraries from an Android native activity

Question

I\'ve built the Assimp library as a shared library. I\'ve included it in my Android ndk project and it builds fine but when I load it I get the following error: Unable to lo

Answer 1

Using System.loadLibrary is the way to go.

Android won't automatically load dependent shared libraries for you. So you need to do something like this:

static {
    System.loadLibrary("assimp");  // dependency .so first
    System.loadLibrary("native-activity"); // dependent .so second
}

This code usually goes in the class which contains the native Java methods (i.e. methods defined with keyword native, which map through to native code). Because this code is executed in a static block it is executed when the Java classloader loads the class -- i.e. before any code in the class actually gets executed.

You shouldn't have to add any reference to assimp to LOCAL_LDLIBS because you're already referencing assimp via the LOCAL_SHARED_LIBRARIES declaration.

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