For background information, the android build configuration was written when Android Studio barely / incompletely supported building C++ directly with gradle. So Hai (@chaoticbob) wrote a gradle plug-in that would overcome the limitations and get things rolling. I believe the intention has always been that it would go away once Android Studio matured enough to build cinder apps as they are meant to be - primarily C++ with java as needed for communication with the java only portions of the android sdk. As you can see from this fairly old and likely outdated wiki page, latest Android Studio was at version 1.3 when the port was initially written, whereas I’m seeing here that 2.3 was just released.
Moving to present day, most of the initial work for the android build system hasn’t seen updates as the authors are working on other platforms at the moment. Before we released 0.9.1, we made a significant effort to unify the cmake build system across all platforms and while this happened for android as well, it didn’t receive much testing which is why it remains considered at an ‘experimental’ state - the C++ side is fine and known to work, but the build configuration, especially concerning gradle, is known to need updates. This could use some support from skilled programmers working with android on a regular basis. @eight_io, It’s great to hear you’re having success with it in the current form, I was under the impression that there are at least a couple path issues that need to be resolved in master branch.
I also think that @Andrea has made some progress in updating some of these configuration files, as mentioned on this forum (see here) - I hope we can get this integrated at some point.
cheers,
Rich