This is a quick PSA for those of you using the GStreamer binary builds for Android.

With the Android NDK r12, the default behaviour while building native code changed from building for armeabi to building for all ABIs. So if your app doesn’t specify APP_ABI in its Application.mk, you will now get an error about unsupported architectures. This was tracked as bug 770631.

The idea behind this change is that your Android app should ship versions of your native code for all supported architectures as a “universal” build, so it is accessible to as many devices as possible.

To deal with this, we now provide a universal tarball which contains binaries for all archiectures that we support. This is currently ARM, ARMv7-A, ARMv8-A (64-bit), x86, and x86-64. That leaves MIPS and MIPS64 that are not currently supported.

If you’ve been using the GStreamer Android binaries before GStreamer 1.9.2, then you should start using the universal tarball rather than the architecture-specific tarball. You will need minor updates to your native build, like we made to the player example. You probably want to put the gstAndroidRoot variable in ~/.gradle/gradle.properties instead, though.

As Sebastian announced, assuming all goes well with the universal tarballs, we will stop shipping the per-arch tarballs — they are redundant, and just take up CI and disk resources.

There are some things that I’d like for us to be able to do better. The first is that Android Studio doesn’t pick up native code with our current build approach. This is a limitation of the Android Gradle NDK plugin, which doesn’t support a custom build. This should change with Android Studio 2.2.

I would also like to integrate better with Android Studio — either be able to specify the GStreamer Android binary path in the UI (like you do for the SDK/NDK), or better yet, have it be possible to specify the dependency in Gradle, and have it be automatically pulled from the Internet. If any of you are familiar with how we can do this, please shout out!